what I’m reading: beartown by fredrik backman.

In the struggling town of Beartown, hockey is everything. The town’s junior hockey team is the best it has been in years, and a championship win could finally put Beartown on the map and revive the struggling town. But when a serious accusation is made against the team’s star player, both the future of the hockey team and Beartown’s way of life are threatened.

Beartown was my book club’s latest pick, and I think I’m in the minority here when I say that I didn’t love it. If I weren’t reading it for book club, I probably would have DNF’d it.

Part of my struggle with this book is simply that I don’t care about hockey. I don’t care about hockey players, hockey parents, hockey clubs, or hockey culture. I found the constant focus on the sport to be tedious and, at times, genuinely boring. Beyond that, the rampant misogyny and bigoted attitudes expressed by many of the characters were difficult to read. More than once, I found myself thinking the book must be set in the 1970s or 1980s, only to remember that it actually takes place in the present day.

This was my first time reading anything by Fredrik Backman, so I can’t say whether this writing style is typical of his work, but it didn’t really work for me. The narrative constantly jumps between characters, sometimes after only a paragraph or a single page, and with such a large cast, I struggled to keep track of everyone. Even in the final pages, a character would appear, and I had no idea who they were.

That said, I did appreciate how vividly Backman brought the town of Beartown to life. The bleakness and isolation of the setting were easy to imagine: the single grocery store, the crumbling factory, the bar where the locals gather. Despite the overwhelming number of characters, the author clearly put care into developing them, giving nearly everyone their own backstory and emotional arc.

While Beartown wasn’t a book I personally enjoyed, it would probably resonate with readers who are interested in small-town dynamics, sports culture, and the ways communities protect the things they love, even when they shouldn’t.