Us Against You
By Fredrik Backman
435 pages
What’s it about?
Beartown is a small town tucked deep in the woods. It is winter most of the time and life is not easy. Hockey is the center of the world here. When it is rumored that Beartown will lose their hockey team a series of events are triggered that will impact many lives.
What did it make me think about?
How hard life is in some places in the world.Should I read it?
I have loved many of Fredrik Backman’s books and been equally frustrated by some of them. “Beartown” was the first story in this trilogy, and it was a book that I greatly admired. Be prepared that “Us Against You” spends the first third of the book recapping “Beartown” and setting up the new story. Mr. Backman writes incredible characters, but for me he sometimes makes the reader’s work too easy. I don’t know if he trusts us to understand what he is getting at, so he tends to explain. “The truth about most people is as simple as it is unbearable: we rarely want what is best for everyone; we mostly want what’s best for ourselves.” Despite all the platitudes Fredrik Backman writes some of the best, most complicated characters, in fiction. I am anxious to read the last book in this trilogy.
Quote-
“Perhaps one day he’ll find words for that feeling of being different. How physical it is. Exclusion is a form of exhaustion that eats its way into your skeleton. People who are like everyone else, who belong to the norm, the majority, can’t possibly understand it. How can they?”What’s it about?
Beartown is a small town tucked deep in the woods. It is winter most of the time and life is not easy. Hockey is the center of the world here. When it is rumored that Beartown will lose their hockey team a series of events are triggered that will impact many lives.
What did it make me think about?
How hard life is in some places in the world.
Should I read it?
I have loved many of Fredrik Backman’s books and been equally frustrated by some of them. “Beartown” was the first story in this trilogy, and it was a book that I greatly admired. Be prepared that “Us Against You” spends the first third of the book recapping “Beartown” and setting up the new story. Mr. Backman writes incredible characters, but for me he sometimes makes the reader’s work too easy. I don’t know if he trusts us to understand what he is getting at, so he tends to explain. “The truth about most people is as simple as it is unbearable: we rarely want what is best for everyone; we mostly want what’s best for ourselves.” Despite all the platitudes Fredrik Backman writes some of the best, most complicated characters, in fiction. I am anxious to read the last book in this trilogy.
Quote-
“Perhaps one day he’ll find words for that feeling of being different. How physical it is. Exclusion is a form of exhaustion that eats its way into your skeleton. People who are like everyone else, who belong to the norm, the majority, can’t possibly understand it. How can they?”
