{"id":2445,"date":"2019-07-15T14:46:37","date_gmt":"2019-07-15T20:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=2445"},"modified":"2022-04-09T11:08:41","modified_gmt":"2022-04-09T17:08:41","slug":"bear-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=2445","title":{"rendered":"Bear Town"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Fredrik Backman, 2016, Washington Square Press<\/p>\n<p>This book is supposedly about a small hockey town in Sweden, but it&#8217;s much more than that.&nbsp; It is about how groups and families interact with one another when something really bad happens.&nbsp; It&#8217;s about self-interest, pride, avarice, and basically how people are.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t get into what transpires in this novel, but I will focus on the construction of the story and the writing.&nbsp; It&#8217;s extremely slow at the beginning as Backman introduces the characters and describes the setting.&nbsp; He uses a great deal of the book to develop the characters and set the stage for what occurs later in the book.&nbsp; There is a large cast of characters and he devotes quite a few pages in developing each of them.&nbsp; I liked some of the characters and detested others but there were also some surprising aspects to some of them.&nbsp; There were situations where some of the characters where conflicted because of the choices they were faced with<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s nuts about hockey. <img decoding=\"async\" title=\"4 stars\" alt=\"4 stars\" src=\"https:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/wp-includes\/images\/stars-4-0.gif\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Fredrik Backman, 2016, Washington Square Press This book is supposedly about a small hockey town in Sweden, but it&#8217;s much more than that.&nbsp; It is about how groups and families interact with one another when something really bad happens.&nbsp; <span class=\"excerpt-dots\">&hellip;<\/span> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=2445\"><span class=\"more-msg\">Continue reading &rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-2445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-four-star","tag-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2445"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2451,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445\/revisions\/2451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}