Us Against You by Fredrik Backman

 

Last year in July, I read Beartown, the first book in the trilogy of the same name, and I loved it. It was always just a question of time before I picked up the second book! Sometimes though, second books in a series can just not quite live up to the first book, but I loved this just as much as I loved the first book.

In Beartown, the town was torn apart by the events leading up to one of the biggest ice hockey games for the club in years. Now, in the aftermath, a lot of the players have moved to play for the nearby fierce rival town of Hed. When the local council announces that the Beartown hockey club is going to be closed down for good, the locals are disappointed.

Enter a shady politician who excels at manipulating people, mainly by pitting them again each other. He gives the club a lifeline in the form of a big name sponsor, but only if the General Manager, Peter, agrees to make certain changes to the club, which will put him in direct opposition to The Pack who are the die hard, extreme supporters who do, on occasion, tend towards violence.

Peter is a man under siege. He is blamed by many people for everything that has gone wrong, especially seeing as his daughter, Maya, was at the centre of the events. His family are receiving constant threats, his marriage is under pressure and his young son is making some bad decisions. It also seems that he can do nothing right at the club. No matter which way he turns, there will be someone who won't like it. 

Given that they lost a lot of players at the end of the previous season, the new coach, who is a woman (shock horror) needs to build a new team around Amat, the fastest skater in town, and Benjy, who long has been the heart and soul of the team. And then there is Vidar, the troubled goal keeper. 

Whilst this is a book about ice hockey, it is also a book about so much more. The way that Backman writes relationships is exceptional. Even the secondary characters can grab your heart and rip it out. In this case it was the relationship between Ann-Katrin (a player called Bobo's mum) and Amat's mother, Fatima, that really captured my heart. 

Backman also has the ability to really make you care about individual characters. Benjy is one of my favourites. He has a secret but when it comes out, everyone has an opinion. Does his ability on the ice make up for his otherness or is too much for the town to accept.  The one things that Benjy does know is that his fearsome sisters will always have his back.

I loved this quote about Benjy!

Everyone in this town knows that Benji is dangerous, because he strikes hardest. Yet few people seem to appreciate that everything about him does just that - strike hardest, beat hardest - the whole time. Including his heart.

Backman is fabulous at building the tension. You know that things are going to come to a head, but the question is what is going to be the catalyst, and what will the lasting impact be. The author has a very interesting way of writing. There is a lot of foreshadowing, some of which might be referencing things that will happen is two years or five years, so you know that your favourite characters are going to make it, but not everyone does.

Once again I was fully invested in the events that were occurring in Beartown. I have already picked the second book up from the library. I was surprised to see how thick the final book in the trilogy is! It's going to be a commitment, but I can't wait to read it and see how everything plays out!

I am sharing this review with the Books in Translation challenge hosted at Introverted Reader.

It's a 5/5 read for me!

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

I am sure that you all have a list of books in your head that people have suggested that you might like. And then they suggest it again and then maybe again,! Beartown is one of those books for me. Boy am I glad that I loved it when I did read it.

Beartown isn't the first thing I have read by Fredrik Backman. Last year I read a short story called The Answer is No which was a bit of fun, and I have watched both the Swedish and American movie versions of A Man Called Ove, so I expected a book that had funny parts with kind of serious undertones. Beartown is not that book!

Beartown is about an economically downtrodden town in a forest in Sweden. The main employers have closed down so the main thing that brings the town hope is the triumphs of the town's ice hockey team. This season they are flying, and they only need a couple more wins to bring the trophy home. But it isn't just about the trophy. If they can win the championships then maybe a new sports academy will be built in the town, bring jobs and prosperity. It's a lot of pressure to put on a group of kids.

There are so many characters in this book and so many contrasts. There is the GM of the team, Peter Andersson, who grew up in Beartown and made it to the big town playing professionally in Canada, only to end up back in town with his ultra competitive lawyer wife and two kids. In contrast, there are men that he played with in town who have never left and who struggle every day just to get by. There is the old coach Sune who built the club and the team culture but the board now want him gone but he doesn't get along with the current team coach David whose coaching ethos can be summarised in just one word. Win!

In the current team there is the star, Kevin, who is this generation's boy who is going to get out of Beartown and make it to the big time. There is Benji, who is Kevin's best friend who is also the enforcer on the team. And yet, he seems to drift around not really worrying too much about school hiding his own secrets from everyone. Then there is Amat, a younger immigrant kid who has been invisible up until recently when someone realises that he is super fast. Suddenly he is part of the team, with all that means, and his friends feel left behind. 

When I started reading the book it took me a little bit to get into it. Thanks to the way that Backman tells the story, you know that something bad is going to happen but it is just a question of when. That style of storytelling starts right from the opening line. 

Late one evening, toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barrelled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else's forehead, and pulled the trigger. This is the story of how we got there.

The tension was built up so well, that in the end I had to put it down for a day or so. We had multiple view points from characters telling us what they were seeing and their own stories, which all helped build up the tension. Once I picked up the book again and got past the main catalyst event, I couldn't put the book down and I just had to see how it all played out, no matter how sad or angry it made me feel. 

And I did feel angry. Very angry at times. At an after party a young girl is raped and the ice hockey club basically implodes. Most of the club members are more concerned at the threat of losing one of their best players on the eve of their biggest games in years and soon people are suggesting that someone is trying to sabotage the team. The young girl involved very quickly becomes the pariah, with suggestions being made that she is lying, or that she was asking for it and so on. Relationships disintegrate, family's are traumatised and the whole town soon has an opinion.

Please don't let the fact that this book features ice hockey put you off reading it. The reality is that this book could be set in a town near you featuring your local sports. It just so happens that Backman set the book in Sweden and features ice hockey, but it could be a suburban cricket team near the beach where similar things happen. It is a universal story.  

I've been involved in kids sports varying from cricket to footy to basketball, and I have to say I recognised some of those parents and some of the attitudes, including the must win no matter what, the parents who you never see at the games, the ones you wish you didn't see at every game and everyone having a very strong opinion on what is the right thing for the club to do. It's just that the people in Beartown dialled it all up a notch or three.

It is also not just a young person's story. How many examples are there of successful sportspeople or entertainment stars where they are accused of behaving badly towards women, or other minority groups, and yet they are back playing sports after a short ban or find themselves working in the media? The message that this sends...being good at sports/singing/producing music etc is far more important than being a decent human being.

This book was a 5/5 read for me. I have already requested the next book from the library. Will I be ready to read it when it comes in? Yes, but I am going to have to psych myself up a bit I think! What I do know is that I will be emotionally invested in the story when I do read it. 

I am sharing this review with the Books in Translation challenge hosted at Introverted Reader.  This book was also one of my nominated 20 Books of Winter reads, and at 488 pages counts as a Big Book of Summer. 

Rating 5/5

Top Ten Tuesday: Foodie TV and movies

 

 

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the them

e is Non-book Freebie so I decided to talk about foreign movies.

The whole point of this post at the beginning was to talk about a movie called Language Lessons which I watched a couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed. Then I started putting my list together and realised that I could easily make a list of ten which are all about food! So here are ten foreign foodie TV series or movies I have enjoyed. 

Midnight Diner (Japan) - I have watched a season and a half of this. Every now and again I think I should watch more. (Review here)

Foodie Love (Spain) - I binged watched this during lockdown (Review here)

Tuesday Club (Sweden) - I watched this as part of the Scandinavian Film Festival and really enjoyed it! (review here)

Babette's Feast (Sweden) - Something of a foodie film classic. (Review here)

The Perfect Dinner (Italy) - I saw this one as part of the Italian Film Festival last year. (Review here)

The Recipe (Korea) - This was one of the earliest foreign movies I posted about on this blog. (review here)

The Tasting (France) - My most recent French Film Festival movie. I saw this a couple of weeks ago and just posted about it last weekend. (review here)

Delicious (France) - This is supposedly the story of the first restaurant although I am not sure how historically correct it is! (review here)

Kings of Pastry (France) - These days I watch Bake Off:  The Professionals to see amazing creations like the ones in this, but these were next level. (review here)

Romantics Anonymous (France) -  I have probably watched this movie 3 or 4 times over the years. It is a lovely film (review here)

Oh, and watch Language Lessons. It was good!

I will be sharing this post with Weekend Cooking which I host here each Saturday.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page

Weekend Cooking: Tisdagsklubben (Tuesday Club)

I have a friend who I go to the movies with quite regularly. We like to go to a place in the city where they show a mixture of new films, foreign and art house style films. Everytime we go we look at the next foreign film festival and say we really need to go to see a movie at the next film festival. And then generally we don't!

When we went to see Where the Crawdads Sing recently we saw that the Scandinavian Film Festival was on and so we had our normal conversation of we really should go and see something. There were several films that look really good, including a Danish film about a husband and wife restauranteur starting Nickolaj Coster-Waldau (from Game of Thrones) called A Taste of Hunger.

In the end, I decided to go to see this film by myself on a Sunday afternoon as my friend wasn't available and my lovely husband was doing something else. I am so glad I did as it was a delightful film to watch.

Karin is apparently happily married to Sten and they are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary when she finds out that maybe he isn't as happy married as she was. Unfortunately, when she shows him the evidence he injures himself and ends up in hospital. Their daughter, Frederika, who is most definitely a papa's girl,  is surprised by how disinterested her mother is in her husband's condition.

When she is reluctantly visiting Sten in hospital, she runs into an old friend from school, Monika. Monika has long been a free spirit, moving from country to country. She has come home to be with her dying mother and needs to stay long enough to sort everything out. She is also very persistent and won't take no for an answer and so Monika convinces Karin to go to dinner with her. After a delicious dinner, they see that the chef is running cooking classes, so they sign up, along with their other friend Pia. 

Over the course of the cooking classes, Karin is reminded of her passion for food, and meets an assorted group of participants. Heading the class is the chef, Henrik, who is very much the grumpy chef who want thing only done his way, He too has recently returned home but he is not sure that he has made the right decision in doing so.

The food that is cooked in the class looks mouth wateringly gorgeous. So many colourful,delicious looking dishes that I am sure tasted amazing! This movie isn't only about the food though. It is about following your passions, about friendships, both new and old, about starting over and taking chances.

It is a rom-com, and it is true to the genre, as you would expect. I would, however, say that it is a superior example. There is humour, has a great soundtrack, including a boot scooting version The Look by Roxette.

The cast is amazing, although I will say that Frederika was a bit of a pain, but she came good at the end. I especially loved where it looked like her story was going!

If you find this available on a streaming service near you, then you could do a lot worse than spend just over an hour and a half watching this film!

The cinema recently starting advertising their Italian film festival, and I already have my eye on at least one film.

 Weekly meals

Saturday - Beef broccolini and mushrooms

Sunday - Roast beef and veggies

Monday - Chicken enchiladas

Tuesday - Pork chops, mash, beans and gravy

Wednesday - Pressure Cooker Spaghetti Bolognaise

Thursday - Pepper beef pie

Friday - Out for dinner

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page