Beartown
By Fredrik Backman
Atria Books
This small town in Sweden lives and breathes hockey. The kids play it, their parents follow it religiously, and just about everyone else in town has their hands or hearts somewhere in that hockey culture. So it would go without saying that the local high school team are considered heroes, and those heroes are put on pedestals. Sometimes those pedestals are too tall to hold the people who are placed upon them, and that’s what Beartown’s about. This is Backman at his best, with his style of interconnectedness that makes it so clear that everyone needs to rely upon everyone else to survive.