A review by loveclairee
Beartown by Fredrik Backman

dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This book is one of my slowest reads so far this year. First, I wanted to appreciate the writing style. Second, it took me a while to adjust to the writing style and the 3rd POV as I was mostly reading 1st POV books recently. This book is great, but I read it at the wrong time. I would still recommend it. Thanks again to my friend for letting me read this book.

Here are some lines that stood out to me:
“Success is never a coincidence. Luck can give you money, but never success,” he often says. —Mr. Erdahl


If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.

What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.

It’s easy for a child to fall in love with something if they’re told that they can be best at it, as long as they want it enough.

One of the hardest things about getting old is admitting mistakes that it’s too late to put right. The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.

All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.

You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.

A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can’t do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right.

There are plenty of things that hurt people without people ever really knowing why. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.

It doesn’t matter how many times you explain it to a child. No one loses a parent that way without knowing that all the other grownups are lying when they say, “It wasn’t your fault.”

People feel pain. And it shrinks their souls.

For years she used to go to bed dreaming of all the things she was going to do when she got older and had more time, and now she sometimes wakes up in despair in the middle of the night because she can no longer remember what those things were.

Pride in a team can come from a variety of causes. Pride in a place, or a community, or just a single person. We devote ourselves to sports because they remind us of how small we are just as much as they make us bigger.

She thinks about that other life far too often. The one someone else is living.

The tactical secret is love.

Any living thing that is kept behind bars for long enough eventually becomes more scared of the unknown than its own captivity.

Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.

She’ll never stop wishing that she hadn’t gone with him up the stairs.

For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.

A thousand wishes yesterday, one single one today.

“Because otherwise he’ll do it again. To someone else.”

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.

There are damn few things in life that are harder than admitting to yourself that you’re a hypocrite.

Fighting isn’t hard. It’s the starting and stopping that are hard. Once you’re actually fighting, it happens more or less instinctively. The complicated thing about fighting is daring to throw the first punch, and then, once you’ve won, refraining from throwing that very last one.

I don’t need any men. I don’t need a man to drive me in a big car to the rink each morning, and I don’t need a man to give me a new job that I don’t want. I don’t need a man to pay my bills, and I don’t need a man to tell me what I can think and feel and believe. I only need one man: my son. And you’re not alone. You’ve never been alone. You just need to be better at choosing the company you keep.

The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washes through them, knocking them off their feet. It’s incomprehensible because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who’s lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying.

“ ‘I was wrong.’ Good words to know.”

There are few words that are harder to explain than “loyalty.” It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.

Another morning comes. It always does. Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with.

Children need the lie to be brave enough to sleep in their beds; parents need it to be able to get up the next morning.



Date Started: March 15, 2023
Date Finished: March 25, 2023
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