I enjoy Charles McCarry’s Paul Christopher series, a great blend of espionage intrigue and commentary on American foreign affairs. Many consider The Last Supper to be his magnum opus. While I enjoyed parts of the book, I will not be one of those people. The Last Supper is not a conventional Christopher novel in that there’s a case and he’s working it. Instead, it’s kind of a biographical work that traces his father’s life and his own. Throughout it are multiple espionage cases handled by the OSS and […]
Have you ever seen a town fall?
Beartown has had a rough few months. A small community in the middle of the forest, the factory that sustains its workers might be shut down, and the one thing they hold fast to more than anything – ice hockey – has been tainted by scandal. Their best player raped a girl and has now left town, the club has been left in ruins, and everyone is looking for someone to blame. Those in the firing line include Peter, the general manager of the hockey […]
“Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.”
Trigger Warning: sexual assault I do not know much about hockey, I live in Texas and while Dallas has an NHL team the whole sport tends to fly under my radar, but you don’t need to know anything about hockey to be enraptured by Beartown. Saying I “enjoyed” Beartown doesn’t seem right, it isn’t a particularly enjoyable story, but like A Man Called Ove Backman delivers a very sad but beautiful story this time about life in a small Swedish town whose entire focus is on their youth hockey team. I’ve […]
“Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.”
Last year, after I read A Man Called Ove, I tried to get my hands on everything Fredrik Backman had written. Including Bear Town. I read it but didn’t review it. I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to say about it…that it was a good book that filled me with dread every time I picked it up? That I didn’t enjoy it but acknowledged that it was great? That, as the parent of a teenage girl, it scared me to death? I wasn’t […]