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Beartown: Hopeful Nightmare for Every Parent
- Mar 30
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Book Review
Every parent of a teenager strives, within the limits of reality, to keep their child safe. And every parent of a teenager tries to find the humor in it all, if only to stay sane. It’s a difficult balancing act. Fredrik Backman, the prolific writer from Sweden, captures this tension perfectly in Beartown, the first novel in a trilogy.
Backman sprinkles the novel with sparkling insights about what it means to be human—and to be a parent. And he writes with the telltale skill of a gifted novelist. Just when you think you know what’s going to happen, you realize you have no clue—much like parenting a teen.
The community of Beartown sits deep in the forest, where little ever changes, except for the fortunes of the town’s hockey program, which spans from the youth team to the semi-pro "A team."
Swirling around the program is every good and every harmful motivation of adults: love, parental nurturing, ambition, money, and power. In many cases it’s all fueled by the alcohol that warms the soul of a town that is always cold. Of course, the adult ability to spoil childhood and youth infect the town. But Backman never lets it infect the storyline. Underneath all of the malevolent maneuverings that drive the town’s most important institution—the hockey rink—Backman reveals a healthy prescription of hope, which he delivers with a steady touch of humor.
Peter, a former hockey star, returns to Beartown to serve as general manager of the town’s hockey program. His wife, Kira, is an attorney who commutes to a much larger town where she tries to approximate the high-powered career she had in the big city before injury wrecked Peter’s professional hockey career and they moved to Beartown. They have two children: a teenage daughter, Maya, and a younger son, Leo.
Obsession is rarely healthy—when things go bad they go real bad. Such is the case with Beartown’s obsession over its hockey program. Something terrible happens and it all goes real bad. It creates a storm that threatens Peter and Kira’s ability to protect their children. Not wanting to offer even a hint of a spoiler, I note that it’s a satisfying ending despite the damage it does to Peter and Kira’s family.
Beartown is not a book about hockey. It’s a powerful and emotionally layered novel about people who keep slipping on the ice. And, despite the awfulness that happens, it’s a wonderful read.
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