by Fredrik Backman, 2016, Washington Square Press

This book is supposedly about a small hockey town in Sweden, but it’s much more than that.  It is about how groups and families interact with one another when something really bad happens.  It’s about self-interest, pride, avarice, and basically how people are.

I won’t get into what transpires in this novel, but I will focus on the construction of the story and the writing.  It’s extremely slow at the beginning as Backman introduces the characters and describes the setting.  He uses a great deal of the book to develop the characters and set the stage for what occurs later in the book.  There is a large cast of characters and he devotes quite a few pages in developing each of them.  I liked some of the characters and detested others but there were also some surprising aspects to some of them.  There were situations where some of the characters where conflicted because of the choices they were faced with

The book, fortunately, picks up the pace later in the book and takes the reader all the way to the surprise ending. I would recommend the book to everyone, but especially if you have ever lived in a small town that’s nuts about hockey.