Winter Reading: The Winners by Fredrik Backman

The Beartown series is perfect to start or catch up on those long winter days and nights.

Fredrik Backman wraps up his big-hearted emotional Beartown series in The Winners. So much has happened to the people of Beartown, from the first book to the last. Tragedy after tragedy is a recurring theme with humor and heartfelt themes of friendship, family, and community, as Fredrik Backman captures the complexities of human behavior and connections. His writing is simple and uncomplicated yet compelling as he explores loyalty, loss, group thinking, competition, rivals, regrets, missed opportunities, and themes for social change, toxic masculinity, sexual assault, and homophobia. He uses foreboding and chapter cliffhangers that had me reading just one more chapter.

The story’s heart is the characters who are easy to fall in love with, cheer on and even yell at. It is a joy to see them grow over the events in the books.

The Winners is one long book at almost 700 pages, with a lot going on for one book. The story begins with a storm two years after Us Against You and takes place in two weeks. It took me longer to read it. Fredrik Backman takes his time getting to the meat of the story while giving us some insight into past events and characters. In each thread of the large cast of characters, we see bits and pieces of them, and when they are mentioned again, I had to think about who they were. I liked the foreboding messages; however, they are repeated a little too often, making me frustrated and taking away from the tension and tragedy that was driving the story forward. However, this did not take away from how much I loved this series and its characters. Even though it’s time to say goodbye to these characters, I will miss them.

While this one is not perfect, you have to appreciate that Backman has put so much love and passion into his stories and characters.

Source: Netgalley

P.S. This is different from the post I initially did. I initially did a post on all the books in the series, and it got lost in all my chaos. Big sigh!!