Us Against You by Fredrik Backman on August 4, 2020
Genres: Fiction / Family Life / General, Fiction / Literary, Fiction / Small Town & Rural
Pages: 448
Format: Audiobook, Paperback
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This is the follow-up to Beartown. I would suggest reading Beartown FIRST if you haven’t read that before reading this one. This is about how a town can make hockey it’s lifeblood. I felt like I could almost be living in this town. The excitement and tense feelings just jump right off the page.
Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did.
Have you ever seen a town rise? Ours did that, too.
Beartown loses its team and financial backing. Their rival Hed transfers their major team members. And the controversy over Kevin still looms large! Everyone either HATES him or feels like he got railroaded. Everyone feels this loss so deeply. The beginning of the book is a little slower, giving us some journey to the past for reminding what happened at the first book and what caused the town’s new struggle. Then we find out that a new comer arrives in Beartown to give the town a new and surprising coach and a chance at a comeback.
After her violent incident, Maya is a different person. She still has people texting and calling her saying mean things and blaming her for the Beartown team demise. She is a ticking bomb about to explode. Her father, Peter, who is also the hockey coach is also struggling. Without his job and hockey anymore he seems to just have no anchor. His family is drifting apart. He doesn’t talk to his wife as much. And it’s hard not to shake him and yell at him to talk to her because she is so smart and always has good plans!!
We see how Benji struggles with his sexuality. Bobo has a lot to deal with at home with his mom being sick and all that. Amat is dealing with his struggles also. And we meet Vidar, the goalie who was released from prison or wherever he was. He and Ana make a cute match, but I can’t even start on their story! (READ to cry and find out more)
We lead up to the big game between Beartown and Hed. All the hints that are dropped about something devastating happening just didn’t stick with me at first. That build up that slowly creeps up and then I felt like I was slapped in the face with what happened. I wasn’t expecting that. WOW!! The tension that just kept mounting and as I listened I wanted to speed it up, but slow it down at the same time.
Backman is a master!! He tackles such huge issues in such a tender way. But also in a way that makes you not forget it. He covers rape, anger, sexuality, and sports culture. This was such an emotional and powerful book!! I cried, I laughed, then I cried some more. I’m so curious to what the next book is going to bring!! I highly recommend this for anyone who likes the books with lots of tension and emotion.
My favorite quotes:
“Anxiety. It owns us but leaves no trace.”
“A parent’s love is unbearable, reckless, irresponsible.”
“Being a mother can be like drying out the foundations of a house or mending a roof: it takes time, sweat, and money, and once it’s done everything looks exactly the same as it did before. It’s not the sort of thing anyone gives you praise for.”
“Culture isn’t just what we encourage but what we allow to happen.”
Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.”
“Exclusion is a form of exhaustion that eats its way into your skeleton.”
“I don’t want you to take me places, I want you to back me up so I can get there myself!”
“If you want to know why people sacrifice everything for love, you have to start by asking how they fell in love. Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something. Just time.”
“It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.”
“The complicated thing about good and bad people alike is that most of us can be both at the same time.”
Ugh… this book!!! HUGE 5 STARS! This book broke me! There’s very little to dislike in this book. You may hate certain characters, but they make you love the story all that much more. You might disagree with a plot line, but it will lead you to the right ending. You know going into this book that something bad is going to happen, but it still comes as such a shock. What these poor characters go through. It’s devastating yet I can’t seem to stop reading more. I can’t wait to dive into the next book and see where they end up.