I really enjoyed the journey of this little town yet again and will be picking up the next book in the series too.Back in 2017 I was excited to read Beartown by Fredrick Backman, in part due to it exploring the events surrounding a community for whom ice hockey is an important part of their lives. Above all, how much emotion he manages to evoke for people who apparently exist only between pages and not beyond. There’s so much to learn on the craft of writing from Backman. We will bury our children beneath our most beautiful trees. All of this with simple yet enticing writing. Which makes me look forward to a reread at some point already!Īnd he also did the opposite – declared what’s going to happen and still kept me hooked to find out what the hell he meant.
I enjoyed the subversions of expectations Backman carried out by holding back certain obvious information which becomes clearer in hindsight. Techniques like these are pulled off so well that it’s a lesson on how to do it right.Ī great deal is expected of anyone who has been given a lot.Īnother MBotF similarity was characters who appear for the first time and may exist only for three pages but would still leave an imprint. Like repetition of short, good lines that stick with you.
There are writing techniques that are so effectively used while writing the story that it doesn’t feel like a technique. Yet when I found myself wondering about my dormant prejudices or reactions to vindictive violence (justified or not) or karma in the book, I started facing genre transcending, similar moral dilemmas of what I would/could do in scenarios where values clash with reality. One of my all time favourite book series is Malazan Book of the Fallen (MBotF). I never expected to be reminded of it while reading Beartown. The plot picks up pretty much from where book one ended, exploring the consequences from the end of the first one and growing into an even more fascinating plot while not failing to intrigue me about newer characters and sub stories. The characters who form the heart of the story – the old ones as well as the bunch of new ones – were just as complicated, making it hard to love or hate everything about them, just like most people we know. The claustrophobic setting of a shrinking town that he created, which allowed conflict and complexities to be magnified and truly flourish, continued to enchant. I wanted to know more about what happened to Beartown, the club, the team, the characters, and I wanted to know them through Backman’s inimitable writing. It’s hard to follow up a good book with one just as good or perhaps better, but Us Against You (Beartown #2)has managed that in my opinion.
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