No one wants to believe her because in Beartown, hockey is everything.
Maya, their oldest, is especially important in the first book, she’s raped by the star hockey player from Beartown. We meet Johnny and Hannah from Hed, and we get to know lawyer Kira and her husband Peter, the former general manager of the Beartown hockey club, and their children. There’s a lot of hatred in Beartown and Hed, these two towns whose hockey rivalry is intense-beyond intense-cruel and at times violent. We know most of them from the first two books, but even if you haven’t read those, Backman explains enough that this book could actually be read as a stand alone novel.Īnd as usual, Backman has much to tell us about life and love and hate. And there are many, many admirable characters in the story. Backman writes frankly about Benji, his hopes and dreams, and makes us fall completely in love with Benji, just as many of the other characters in the story do, before he meets his tragic, heroic end.
They die violently.”Īnd we love Benji, so from the very first page, our hearts are broken. And if that wasn’t enough, the last sentence of that half-page first chapter warns us that, “Boys like Benji die young. The first sentence is, “Everyone who knew Benjamin Ovich, particularly those of us who knew him well enough to call him Benji, probably knew deep down that he was never the sort of person who would get a happy ending.” So there you have it you’ve been warned. This is not a story with twists and turns he flat out tells us what the future will bring. Backman excels at displaying the extremes of human emotions through his at-times visceral narrative.īackman’s writing is lyrical as we hear the narrative through a plural entity that is like a voice for the town. But that’s because Backman has a lot to tell us, and we are immediately immersed in the small towns of Beartown and Hed, it’s neighboring town, watching as hockey brings the townspeople together and almost destroys them. The first thing you notice about “The Winners,” Fredrik Backman’s conclusion to the “ Beartown” trilogy, is that it’s huge-over 650 pages.
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