Earlier this month, Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint released US
AGAINST YOU by Fredrik Backman; it is the sequel to Beartown, a book which has generated
some lengthy discussions at our high school. The stories in both novels take
place at a small town where hockey championships are truly a focus and “kids
get raised with the philosophy ‘the stats never lie.’ Either you’re the best,
or you’re everyone else.” As the new novel opens, reverberations from a sexual
assault by one of the key players are still being felt and there is talk of
disbanding the team. “The idiots won’t say it was Kevin who killed Beartown Ice
Hockey, they’ll say ‘the scandal’ killed the club. … their real problem isn’t
that Kevin raped someone, but that Maya got raped. … Women are always the
problem in the men’s world.”
The story is classic Backman (he also wrote A Man Called Ove and others), with much
empathy for those with less power and with anger against the bureaucracy: “it
is divided in the way that all worlds are divided between people: between those
who are listened to, and those you aren’t” OR “sports are only sports until
someone who doesn’t give a damn about sports has something to gain from them,
then sports suddenly become economics.” Once again, Backman gives readers much
to discuss in US AGAINST YOU which received a starred review from Library Journal.
