It's a bit overcast and cool this morning, the last official weekend of summer, and I’ve got a bowl of fresh local fruit and a steaming cup of chai to celebrate. I’m in the middle of my next Friends’ book club selection right now, but I finally finished a book that I want to tell you about.
It took me nearly two weeks to read Fredrik Backman’s Us Against You, the second book in his “Beartown” trilogy, but thankfully I finished mid-week. In February 2021, my book club read Beartown as our “banned book” selection, and looking over my blog post for this book, I see that my thoughts on Beartown are similar to those on the second book, that it was too long and overly repetitive, but that the storylines and themes were interesting. This novel takes over from the point when the last one left off, and follows the characters of Beartown through the year following the consequences of the rape of one of the town’s teens, exploring the fate of the Beartown Hockey Club and the future of Beartown itself. I’m not even going to summarize the storylines, as there were too many and they were overly complicated, in my opinion. And I felt that the biggest problem with this book for me was that at least the first third was a retelling of the first book, which I thought most people would have read before reading this one, making this book unnecessarily long and tedious. So I didn’t love it, even though most people do, according to reviews. I’ve heard that the last book in the trilogy, The Winners, is really good, but it’s over 600 pages (Us Against You had less than 500), so I doubt that I will be reading it any time soon. I have plenty of books for my upcoming book club meetings to read, as well as the stacks of library books that have been left neglected on my shelf. *sigh* There will always be more books to read than there is time to read them, a sad fact of life that is difficult for me to accept.
Oh, the sun just came out, so I think it’s time to get dressed and get outside for a wonderfully long walk.
Bye for now…Julie
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