The Winners by Fredrik Backman on September 27, 2022
Genres: Fiction / Literary, Fiction / Small Town & Rural, Fiction / Sports
Pages: 688
Format: Hardcover
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
“We fool ourselves that we can protect the people we love, because if we accepted the truth we’d never let them out of our sight.”
Two years have passed since the events that no one wants to think about. Everyone has tried to move on, but there’s something about this place that prevents it. The residents continue to grapple with life’s big questions: What is a family? What is a community? And what, if anything, are we willing to sacrifice in order to protect them? As the locals of Beartown struggle to overcome the past, great change is on the horizon. Someone is coming home after a long time away. Someone will be laid to rest. Someone will fall in love, someone will try to fix their marriage, and someone will do anything to save their children. Someone will submit to hate, someone will fight, and someone will grab a gun and walk towards the ice rink.
This is the third installment of the Beartown series. The characters in this series are wonderful and I loved seeing them again. Not to mention how this novel really started off with a bang by having a bad storm and an anxious vide to it. Unfortunately, it went downhill for me after that. Instead of feeling all excited to see what was coming next, the book is bogged down in repetition. Repetition of what the characters went through before – which we already know. Repetition of how the two towns hated each other. I was incredibly tired of the politics, the scheming, the money involved in building the new club, etc, etc, etc. I’m calling it Beartown burnout.
I rated this novel 3.5 stars. THE BOOK WAS TOO LONG!! These characters must be so special to Mr. Backman that he felt he needed to tie everything up. He is a master storyteller, but at almost 700 pages I was definitely skimming pages to get to the end.