I picked up this book because I wanted to read something in Swedish. I had a project coming up where I had to use Swedish, and since my Swedish was a little bit rusty, I figured I could refresh my skills reading a book. It tends to work. My project got postponed but I did get back into reading in Swedish!

This was a surprisingly good read for me. The book is so popular that I was expecting some kind of cheap tear-jerking melodrama. Granted, Backman does get pretty close to it, but I found the story and especially the characters to be deeply moving. I loved specifically the teenagers who were written as actual humans instead of hormone-ravaged dramatic extensions of their parents.

Backman has taken on a difficult subject, but I think he managed very well. This was great, especially coming from a male author and a story about ice hockey and a small community.

This book built tension for a long time, just building and building and building until I was incredibly stressed about a fictional hockey game. Rarely does a book make me this invested. (Being stressed about a real hockey game is another story) When tension is solved, he starts building it again, and again I am stressed. It was pretty amazing.

Backman writes in short sentences, aimed at maximum impact. The language is pretty simple and plain, which was great for me as my Swedish is far from perfect and I'm just getting back into reading in Swedish. It's quite likely that my opinion would be different if I'd read it in another language.

So many things about this book felt so familiar - the anxiety of small towns slowly dying, jobs and services moving further and further away into bigger cities, a cause bringing a whole community together and not necessarily in a good way, xenophobia and racism, misogyny and rape culture.

This book is, in my opinion, about empathy. Its goal is to make you feel empathy for a large cast of characters and their circumstances and (view spoiler). That's a great goal. In fact, isn't empathy one of the wonderful things that literature can teach us?