A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.
In Beartown, where the people are as "tough as the forest, as hard as the ice," the star player on the beloved hockey team is accused of rape, and the town turns upon itself.
Swedish novelist Backman’s (A Man Called Ove, 2014, etc.) story quickly becomes a rich exploration of the culture of hockey, a sport whose acolytes see it as a violent liturgy on ice. Beartown explodes after rape charges are brought against the talented Kevin, son of privilege and influence, who's nearly untouchable because of his transcendent talent. The victim is Maya, the teenage daughter of the hockey club’s much-admired general manager, Peter, another Beartown golden boy, a hockey star who made it to the NHL. Peter was lured home to bring winning hockey back to Beartown. Now, after years of despair, the local club is on the cusp of a championship, but not without Kevin. Backman is a masterful writer, his characters familiar yet distinct, flawed yet heroic. Despite his love for hockey, where fights are part of the game, Peter hates violence. Kira, his wife, is an attorney with an aggressive, take-no-prisoners demeanor. Minor characters include Sune, "the man who has been coach of Beartown's A-team since Peter was a boy," whom the sponsors now want fired. There are scenes that bring tears, scenes of gut-wrenching despair, and moments of sly humor: the club president’s table manners are so crude "you can’t help wondering if he’s actually misunderstood the whole concept of eating." Like Friday Night Lights, this is about more than youth sports; it's part coming-of-age novel, part study of moral failure, and finally a chronicle of groupthink in which an unlikely hero steps forward to save more than one person from self-destruction.
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6076-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Outer Dark, on the perimeter of nowhere, is the second one of Cormac McCarthy's penumbral, parabolic tales (The Orchard Keeper—1965) which resist time and specific definition. Against a landscape as sparse as the trees on the ridge just yonder, anonymous characters, the ferryman, the snake hunter, the beekeeper, the preacher, pursue an unyielding existence. Only a little more identified here are Culla Holme and Rinthy, his nineteen-year-old sister who has just had (his?) child in a cabin. A day or two later he tells her it has died, while going off with the tinker to leave the child elsewhere (where?). Rinthy as soon as she is strong enough goes on her long search to find the tinker and her child; Culla follows her with death rubbing shoulders here and there to the end of a dusty road—the tinker strung up on a tree, the child with empty, unseeing eyes. . . A somnolent fascination, a spectral charade, but for whom?
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1968
ISBN: 0679728732
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1968
IN THE NEWS
A striking literary fantasy informed by Arden's deep knowledge of and affection for this time and place.
A satisfying conclusion to a trilogy set in medieval times in the area on the verge of becoming Russia.
In a luxuriously detailed yet briskly suspenseful follow-up to The Bear and the Nightingale (2017) and The Girl in the Tower (2018), Arden's historically based fantasy follows heroic Vasya—a young woman with a strong connection to the spirits of the place where she lives—as she attempts to save her family and her country from evil forces. Because the novel starts with a bang where the preceding volume left off, with Moscow nearly burned to a crisp by a Firebird imperfectly controlled by Vasya, readers are advised to backtrack to the two earlier books rather than attempt to sort out all the characters and backstory on the fly. Among the humans are Vasya's sister, Olga, compromised by her desire for wealth and position; her brother, Sasha, a monk with a taste for the military life; Grand Prince Dmitrii; and corrupt priest Konstantin. Among the inhuman are the warring brothers Morozko, the winter-king with whom Vasya conducts a conflicted romance, and Medved, a demon addicted to chaos. Arden keeps the narrative fresh by sending Vasya questing into fantastic realms, each with its own demanding set of rules and its own alluring or forbidding geography, and by introducing new “chyerti,” demons or spirits, including an officious little mushroom spirit who indiscriminately plies Vasya with fungi, some edible and some distinctly not. Fans of Russian mythology will be pleased to find that Baba Yaga puts in a cameo appearance to straighten out some of the complicated genealogy. The trilogy leads up to the Battle of Kulikovo, which many consider the beginning of a united Russia. Arden neatly establishes parallels between Vasya's internal struggles, between attachment and freedom or the human world and the spiritual one, for example, and those taking place in the world around her.
A striking literary fantasy informed by Arden's deep knowledge of and affection for this time and place.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-88599-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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