David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "good-and-evil"
Beartown
If you haven't read A MAN CALLED OVE, you've missed out. Fredrik Backman's second effort, MY GRANDMOTHER ASKED ME TO TELL YOU SHE'S SORRY is more of a fantasy, an acquired taste, shall we say. With BEARTOWN Backman is back on track as my new favorite novelist.
Beartown is a dying town assumably in the midst of the Swedish northern forest. All they've got is their semi-pro hockey team. In this instance it's the junior hockey team the townspeople are excited about. Peter, the General Manager, and David, the coach, have groomed an assortment of pups into a formidable unit that will play in the national semi-finals. The star player is Kevin Erdahl who is good enough to some day play in the NHL. This is a tough league. An opposing player will put Kevin in the hospital without his best friend, Benji.”the bravest bastard I know,” according to his coach. But they're slow. Sune, the A team coach, notices this kid who shows up at the rink early in the morning to practice his game. His name is Amat, and he will play in the semi-final game despite the fact that he's only fifteen.
But there's a party after the semi-final game, and a girl is raped. Complication, the rapist is the best player on the junior team and the girl is Peter's fifteen-year-old daughter, Maya. She waits a week but she eventually files a rape charge, just before the final game. Just about everybody in Beartown hates her and her father.
There's some pretty cool stuff in this book. Ramona, the owner of the local watering hole, tells one of the sponsors of the Beartown A-team: “We may not know the difference between right and wrong, but we know the difference between good and evil.”
Peter's wife is pretty cool, too. Her name is Kira; she wants to kill the boy who hurt her daughter, but she's a lawyer, so she'll use every ploy she can think of to hurt him and his family in other ways. The other mothers in kindergarten called her The Wolf Mother.
The ending sort of fades. Four kids bring the Beartown team back to prominence; two will play in the NFL, one will die. We know which one it is, but Backman doesn't tell us how he died. He has a secret, so maybe that was what finally got him, but you'll have to decide for yourself of write Backman a nasty letter.
Beartown is a dying town assumably in the midst of the Swedish northern forest. All they've got is their semi-pro hockey team. In this instance it's the junior hockey team the townspeople are excited about. Peter, the General Manager, and David, the coach, have groomed an assortment of pups into a formidable unit that will play in the national semi-finals. The star player is Kevin Erdahl who is good enough to some day play in the NHL. This is a tough league. An opposing player will put Kevin in the hospital without his best friend, Benji.”the bravest bastard I know,” according to his coach. But they're slow. Sune, the A team coach, notices this kid who shows up at the rink early in the morning to practice his game. His name is Amat, and he will play in the semi-final game despite the fact that he's only fifteen.
But there's a party after the semi-final game, and a girl is raped. Complication, the rapist is the best player on the junior team and the girl is Peter's fifteen-year-old daughter, Maya. She waits a week but she eventually files a rape charge, just before the final game. Just about everybody in Beartown hates her and her father.
There's some pretty cool stuff in this book. Ramona, the owner of the local watering hole, tells one of the sponsors of the Beartown A-team: “We may not know the difference between right and wrong, but we know the difference between good and evil.”
Peter's wife is pretty cool, too. Her name is Kira; she wants to kill the boy who hurt her daughter, but she's a lawyer, so she'll use every ploy she can think of to hurt him and his family in other ways. The other mothers in kindergarten called her The Wolf Mother.
The ending sort of fades. Four kids bring the Beartown team back to prominence; two will play in the NFL, one will die. We know which one it is, but Backman doesn't tell us how he died. He has a secret, so maybe that was what finally got him, but you'll have to decide for yourself of write Backman a nasty letter.
