Category: Random

Book Review: Beartown

Lauren3 Comments

A short recap of my history with Fredrik Backman.  I’ve read two of his books — A Man Called Ove and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry — and loved them both!  That’s it.  That’s my history.  Told you it was short 🙂

I saw Beartown on a list of the best books of 2017 and was on board right away.  That being said, this book was a bit different for Backman.  There’s no curmudgeon!  Unless you count the town barkeep, but as she’s one of like 30 “main” characters, she doesn’t get a ton of airtime.

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Basically, this book is about a small town that eats, sleeps and breathes hockey and an incident involving the star player, Kevin, and the General Manager’s daughter, Maya.  What happens challenges everyone to question their own loyalties and morals.  It breaks the town but then remakes it.

The entire time I read it, something felt off but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I tried to explain it out loud to Joey.  Backman jumps back and forth between characters SO MUCH.  Every paragraph revolves around a different character.  In the beginning, I figured we were just meeting everyone, but it went on like that for the rest of the book.  There’s also SO MANY stories from the characters’ pasts (before the book takes place) included.  Again, in the beginning, this was fine but it continued on throughout the book, to the point where you spend more time hearing about things that happened in the past than you spend with the characters in the present action of the book.  It was wholly strange and it gave me an unending feeling that I didn’t really know the characters at all.

That being said, what you will get, and what I’ve come to love about Fredrik Backman’s novels, is a great deal of heart.  There are certainly many characters who are bad people with bad morals but there are just as many characters who know right from wrong, who show fierce loyalty and unfaltering compassion towards those they love and honestly, that’s enough to keep me reading.

Have you read Beartown (or anything by Fredrik Backman)?

What are you reading right now?

Christmas Lights

LaurenLeave a comment

Not long ago, I used to assemble a group of people to drive around and look at Christmas lights with.  Some years we’d need a mini van to fit us all and other years it would be a smaller group.  Sometimes I’d bring cookies, sometimes we’d pick up holiday drinks from Starbucks before heading out.  We’d see houses that were so done up you needed to get out of the car and really take it all in or houses that you’d show up to only to find the owners had already turned everything off for the night.  But no matter what, we would always have fun.

I guess I don’t really remember when or why we stopped this yearly tradition, but in a way that is VERY unlike me, I don’t remember being sad or upset about it ending.  This year, we sort of brought it back.  But like a very low maintenance version.  As in, it was just Joey and I, I spent all of 5 minutes looking up the best houses and more time was spent just driving through the surrounding neighborhoods than actually staying “on course.”

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Our two favorite houses ended up being ones we just happened upon, go figure!  I took an Instagram video of the very best one and totally forgot to take an actual picture, unless you count this selfie of Joey and I looking like we’re about to audition for Wicked. 

This year’s impromptu outing suddenly jogged my memory and I had an “oh yeah, we used to do this all the time!” moment where I briefly thought back on all the other times I’d gone Christmas light looking.  But for once, I didn’t feel that anxious longing to bring back the tradition, and instead spent a happy minute remembering all those previous years before jumping back into the experience I was having right then.  Feels good to know I maybe am capable of having a healthy relationship with holiday traditions and actually can (and will) be okay letting them come and go as they please.

In other news, I’m going to see Christmas Vacation at a movie theater tonight and I’m sort of crazy excited about it.  Wishing you all a happy weekend!