“Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.” (Beartown by Fredrik Backman)
I avoid reading books about real things. Anything with rape, children dying or being harmed, politics, genocide, war, etc. Unless they’re overshadowed by a fantastical setting, I just avoid those topics. I read to escape thinking about horrible things, not to confront them. However, recently that technique hasn’t been working for me. This book has a dead child, rape, sports, and politics. I thought about putting it down four or five times, at each major revelation, but each time the complex characters called me back to the book. I’m glad they did.
It is wonderful to not be able to predict a book. In my chosen genres, I can see a death coming chapters before it happens. I can predict long-term plots twists with terrifying accuracy. I usually enjoy this, this being right, but recently, it has yielded only unsatisfactory reading experiences for me. In Beartown, I could see nothing. I didn’t predict the rape, who shot whom, the dead child, nothing. I saw nothing coming because realism is not my genre; I do not know its tropes. While my surprise at confronting a new genre isn’t enough reason for you to pick up the book, Backman’s talent at detailing fully realized characters is. He defines each character, no matter how minor, with such sympathy and realism that you feel you know them entirely, even though you only spend a short time with each member of the huge cast.
Book Lion 