Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

Girls aren’t allowed to like hockey even just a little bit in Beartown. Ideally they shouldn’t like it at all. Because if you like the sport you must be a lesbian, and if you like the players you’re a slut. Ana feels like pushing her neighbor up against the wall and telling him that the locker room where those boys sit telling their stupid jokes ends up preserving them like a tin can. It makes them mature more slowly, while some even go rotten inside. And they don’t have any female friends, and there are no women’s teams here, so they learn that hockey only belongs to them, and their coaches teach them that girls are a “distraction.” So they learn that girls only exist for fucking. She wants to point out how all the old men in this town praise them for “fighting” and “not backing down,” but not one single person tells them that when a girl says no, it means NO. And the problem with this town is not only that a boy raped a girl, but that everyone is pretending that he DIDN’T do it. So now all the other boys will think that what he did was okay. Because no one cares. Ana wants to stand on the rooftop and scream: “You don’t give a shit about Maya! And you don’t really give a shit about Kevin either! Because they’re not people to you, they’re just objects of value. And his value is far greater than hers!”