Beartown – Fredrik Backman

Hockey is more than a sport in Beartown, it is a way of life.  When the junior team finds themselves in line for the championship for the first time in generations, things start looking up for the whole town.  But when the star player is accused of raping the daughter of the team’s GM and is arrested the morning of the final, it puts the towns loyalty to the test, a test which many fail.

Back in 2023, I inadvertently read The Winners, the third book of Fredrik Backman’s Beartown series.  It certainly took me a while to circle back to the beginning, which I have finally done with Beartown.  I retained enough of the previous book where the characters are familiar to me, but not enough to fully remember where they all end up, which, I guess, is a good thing.  Here’s hoping it doesn’t take me another three and a half years to read the middle chapter.