Audiobook Review: The Winners by Fredrik Backman, narrated by Marin Ireland

The Winners
by Fredrik Backman, narrated by Marin Ireland (Compact Disc Backman)

Fredrik Backman returns to the characters and settings of Beartown and Us Against You to conclude a trilogy of devastatingly emotional storylines in The Winners. Beartown (2017) was a One Book – One Lincoln finalist in 2018, and introduced us to the small forest towns of Beartown and Hed (in Sweden, though it is never explicitly said), where both communities entire identities were tied into their individual hockey teams. When a rape occurs involving Beartown’s star player and the daughter of the team’s general manager, society breaks down. In Us Against You the possible dissolution of Beartown’s hockey team leads to a new configuration of star players, new types of friendships, and new antagonisms.

 

In The Winners, a few more years have passed, and Beartown hockey is once more on the rise, while a devastating storm destroys Hed’s hockey facility and causes even more friction between the two towns’ fanbases as the two teams must share an arena. Brewing resentments and hatreds slowly percolate beneath the surface, as old friendships are rekindled or re-explored, and characters who found themselves uprooted in the previous books face new beginnings.

 

Backman’s storytelling style, in which, throughout the book he throws in little asides about the long-term future of all the characters, makes you realize that before this book is done, there is going to be a life-changing event that impacts every single one of these people who readers have grown to admire and care about. The tension is slowly ratcheted up bit-by-bit, with occasionally moments of levity. But by the final few chapters you are on the edge of your seat, concerned with who will survive to the final page.

 

I really admired actress Marin Ireland’s narration of The Winners. She manages to create unique voices for nearly all of the characters, making me emotionally buy in to their journey. I generally listened to audiobooks-on-cd in my car, and I can honestly say that I was talking back to my CD player and my eyes were misting over as this story came to its climax. An excellent book, and I’ll only drop it from a “10” to a “9” for some minor pacing issues. Still highly recommended.

 

(You really, REALLY, have to have read/listened-to Beartown and Us Against You before you read/listen-to The Winners. Seriously, take my word for it! Otherwise, the rest of Fredrik Backman’s novels should also appeal to you, although this trilogy is Backman’s darkest works — the rest are significantly darker and more humorous than these three.)

 

( official The Winners page on the official Fredrik Backman web site )

 

See Scott C.’s review of the audiobook of Beartown in the June 2018 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

See Scott C.’s review of the audiobook of Us Against You in the March 2019 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: Becoming Unbecoming by Una

Becoming Unbecoming
by Una (741.5 Una)

Something about the cover of this graphic novel caught my attention and convinced me to read it, and I’m very glad I did. Most of my graphic novel reading tends to focus on narrative-driven adventure stories, so this autobiographical and philosophical look at rape culture, survival/recovery and societal trends related to the treatment of women, was a powerful and thought-provoking change of pace.

Author/artist Una was the victim of sexual assault relatively early in her life, and it was a defining experience for her — one that colored the rest of her life and affected both her interactions with others and how she viewed the world around her. She tells her own story, interspersed with facts, figures and statistics about sexual assault, and interwoven with observations on a famous case about a British sexual serial killer and how he got away with multiple killings or sexual assaults and was not identified or arrested for decades.

Una’s artwork has elements of extreme simplicity, but also features moments of detailed and compelling beauty. Pages can be jam-packed with intricate artwork, or can have one small image surrounded by oppressive white space. She approaches the horrors of her own assault, societal shaming, and the assaults on other women with stark and often emotionless realism. But her story is powerfully moving. The Kirkus Reviews quote on the cover — “A graphic manifesto for female empowerment and a punch to the gut of predatory males” sums up the content of this book with precise and accurate sentiment.

I particularly appreciated the way she ended the book — artistically representing what 13 fatal victims of male-on-female violence might have looked like decades after their assaults, if they’d survived.

This is not a “feel good” story, but it is definitely one that makes you think about the world around you. If you don’t feel a sense of outrage by the end of the book, you may need to re-evaluate your personal capacity for empathy.

[ publisher’s official Becoming Unbecoming web page ] | [ official Una web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Beartown by Fredrik Backman (on CD) + One Book discussion tonight!

Beartown
by Fredrik Backman [Compact Disc Backman]

Beartown is the first of this year’s One Book – One Lincoln finalists that I had the chance to read, or in this case, listen to, as I enjoyed the Book-on-CD version of Fredrik Backman’s novel. Though set in the author’s native Sweden, this felt like it could’ve been any small northern U.S. or Canadian town. Beartown is a community that is hockey obsessed. The entire community relies, in one way or another, on the industry of hockey, and the young men who play on either the “junior” team or the “A” team hold exalted positions within Beartown society. The events and perspective of the novel Beartown rotate among a wide variety of characters throughout Beartown’s community, from the young players, the groupies, the local businessmen sponsoring the team, and the coaches and managers, to the families of the players, the also-rans that never quite succeeded, and the folks who just don’t “get” why hockey is so important.

The characters are all well drawn and defined. I particularly enjoyed following players Benji, Bobo and Amat, as well as the various coaches, sponsors and colorful residents of Beartown. The main plot of the novel hinges on an incident in which the star player of the junior team rapes one of the girls in his class, who just happens to be the daughter of the hockey club’s general manager. This sets up a battle of morals, ethics, partisanship and community survival that is actually painful to observe.
The audiobook adaptation, narrated by Marin Ireland, was extremely well-done, and I strongly recommend this version of the story, if you’re a fan of audiobooks. Of the three things I’ve read or sampled by Backman, each has had a completely different style/tone. This is the darkest I’ve seen from him so far. For those who like this, I’m pleased to see that Us Against You, a sequel to Beartown, came out the first week of June!

[ publisher’s official Beartown web page ] | [ official English-language Fredrik Backman web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

Don't miss tonight's One Book - One Lincoln Discussion of Beartown at the Francie & Finch bookstore in downtown Lincoln, 6:00-7:00 p.m.! Join fellow fans to discuss this specific One Book finalist!

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewers recommendations!