Book Review: THE WINNERS by Fredrik Backman

After thoroughly enjoying and being emotionally invested in the Beartown series, I have concluded my journey with its final installment, "The Winners." This novel has continued to keep up with the ethos of ice hockey and how it isn't just a sport for many but rather a way of life; maybe even life itself.



“A hockey club isn't a hockey club, it's everyone you know. It's your grandparents' club, your mom and dad's club, there's a pub in town that used to be owned by a crazy old woman and a nice old man and it was their club too. It belongs to your neighbors and friends and the girl at the supermarket checkout and the mechanic who mends your car and the teacher who educates your children. It belongs to lawyers and general managers and firemen and midwives. A hockey club is the girl you played with in the forest and slept back-to-back with throughout your childhood, even though she doesn't even like hockey.
It's the most handsome, wildest boy with a smile that's big enough for him to be able to contain all that is darkest and most beautiful inside him. The hockey club doesn't play for itself, it plays for us.”

- Fredrik Backman, “The Winners”

It is nothing short of alchemy when an author has the power to make three books in a series equally compelling and heart touching. It was one of the longer works by Backman and that really highlights the point that he did not hurry through the plot or give the readers a rushed ending. In the usual Backman style, the plot unveiled itself in a breezy pace with events interwoven in between. Since this is the third book in the series, by now, the characters have more or less become family and friends to the readers. We readers become Beartown inhabitants or rather "forest folk" and as stated in the book, "you don't always know that until you have a forest to be a folk in."
This familiarity and love we the readers have towards the forest folk makes their tragedies and loses more poignant and personal.

Just like in "US AGAINST YOU", the shades of morality that exist in white, black and often grey continue to be explored in this novel. Good people who are capable of great evil, along with terrible people who are capable of great goodness are portrayed vividly in this novel. The bad sides of supposedly "good" people were shown along with the good sides of allegedly "bad" people. Then the vastly grey area of at times pious, and at times shrewd individuals.

This has been quite a rollercoaster ride, perhaps a bumpy path through the forest. We get to witness moments of wholesomeness, cherish the togetherness and also mourn the losses. And even after all that, we continue to live with hope, one day at a time because there is a bear in all of us; We are the bears! BEARS FROM BEARTOWN.

- Rithin.



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