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I hated this book. It’s an outstanding book. Unmissable. I won’t forget it.

I wrestled with Backman throughout. “Never write another Beartown book��, I demanded over halfway through, because I will read it and go through hating this all over again.

Reading well over halfway through this book, I struggled to remember the arc of my experience reading Beartown. Did I have to be grudgingly won over, beyond not wanting to read the book from the start (because, kids playing hockey?)?

I knew before long that Backman was not going to be able to win me over with this one. Not even Backman, Mr. faith in humanity, can turn this around believably and meaningfully. Well, I thought, he could, but clearly he’s not meaning to. This is a different Backman. Such a beguiling yet miserable read.

As a sequel, this story begins at a very low point, following a devastating ending to book 1. And it doesn’t pick up to a more hopeful place in order to have a normal rhythm for a novel. We start in that dark night of the soul, and we stay there, and of course it gets worse. We start in hell, for these characters, and essentially we stay there.

After a while I had no faith that Backman would give us any redemption. I was sure I would hate this book at the end, after not being able to stop reading but resenting the endless dark night.

Backman is SO good.

His civil, almost gentle tone is a jarring counterpoint to the emotional devastation, physical violence, emotional and physical mortal danger.

Backman is unflinching. He gives the reader no outs.

He drags us through some of the most fundamental moral and human conundrums we face today. Yet somehow he does this with grace and gloved hands.

Backman doesn’t just pose interesting questions. He drags you through the jagged rock pile.

Just how bad can we be, individually and together, in our relentless drive to belong...to not be alone...to be safer, stronger, bigger, better, scarier, more real, able to go on....because we are accepted in a tribe, knitted into or hanging onto a family or a friendship?

How good might we possibly be in the midst of so much toxic belonging, and what will it cost?

Is it even possible to have an us unless it is against, always potentially devastatingly against, a them?

When belonging is a force for good, is it enough to overcome the bad?

How survivable is any of this?

Also, what place has masculine power in a modern world?

What are we to think of the experience of being female seemingly always in reaction to the power and effect of masculinity? When is it possible to have a female experience not in some way shaped by male struggle, force, privilege, or presumption?

Backman’s characters are real and powerful. We rarely get to purely root for or despise anyone.

He makes us care whether we want to or not. At one point, when tragedy was clearly coming up just over the approaching peak of roller coaster track of the reading experience, the decibel level of my internal “NO!�� shocked me. And I kept on. No and No and No! And then, what?? What happened?? What just happened??

He does this multiple times, teasing up a critical event, piquing our dread, delaying the truth, making it work.

Backman is a masterful storyteller, no doubt. But he’s more than that.

He took me through many of my own feelings about the state of humanity, the things we do to others or allow from others for such base and maybe inescapable reasons (not to say all actions are excusable, but that reasons are as universal as they may be damning). Pummeled me with the big questions about humanity, personhood, and civilization: hope, faith, despair, mistrust, cynicism, renewal, the will to go on.

By the last 30% or so, Backman had me right where he wanted me. No, I think he had me right where he wanted me all along. He had taken me through not just the depths of experiences of the characters and the town, but my own gnarly feelings and reflexions on his themes. He wrestled me like Jacob with his angel.

While the ending was not quite as strong as the rest of the book, the novel is quite an accomplishment. I did not hate it at the end. I won’t forget though that I hated this book, or that I was never unmoved, many times surprised by where he took me—and I don’t just mean in the plot, and definitely grateful and satisfied for the experience.