emara's Reviews > Beartown

'what an uncomfortable, terrible source of shame it is for the world that the victim is so often the one left with the most empathy for others.’

this book is my baby, these characters are my children, and this will be buried with me.


beartown is a small town that brings hope to a small community, the courage it takes for an individual to go against expectations. and holds the secrets that may separate them.


it's about love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, resistance and courage. it's about parenthood, classism, child loss, grief, toxic masculinity, rape and sexual assault, abuse and suicide, sexism, homophobia, and so much more.


while everyone has their own story, this book mostly revolves around the rape of a girl- maya, and the consequences of the people's actions and lack thereof.


the writing, the pacing, the plot, the characters and their stories. you would think that this would be messy with all the topics talked about in such a regular sized book but no, it was paced so well. the way every topic was seeped into the characters so flawlessly was mwah, perfection.


every single character was written so incredibly. he gradually introduced each character and unfolded their stories without slowing down the general plot.


hockey was the heart of beartown and its people. it shows that while everyone has their own secrets and battles, hockey will either be something that brings them all together or keep them apart.


onto the characters ⤵️


amat - my baby

✦ he's so kind, loving, and selfless. he tried so hard to do right by everyone, especially his mother. him getting maya a guitar? absolutely everything. helping his mother by cleaning so much so that she wouldn't have to clean as much? my heart💔

'all the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. do good anyway.'

'they say i'm too little to play. become good player anyway'

fatima - my favorite kind-hearted person

✦ the wisdom she offered amat every step of the way. his selflessness comes entirely from her, i loved their little family so much, they deserve the most.


benji - the boy with sad eyes and a wild heart

✦ the love he deserves for all he has and hasn't done is eternal. his character was written so well. i didn't think i would love him as much i do now when he was first introduced- because of the way he acted and who he was with- but when his story started to unfold and we saw glimpses of who he actually is as a person; he immediately became my favorite besides amat. loved that he was kind to maya after what occurred and hate how out of place he felt with the homophobic "jokes" said by his teammates his friends. i love his family so much, you can tell he was raised by women. it was so sad how he always found ways to hurt himself just so he can't feel the pain on the inside.

'he's never cut his own skin, but he understands those who do.'

maya - and her guitar

✦ she's so brave and kind. loved how her character evolved throughout the story and how she learns there is more to the world than just the confinements of the small world she created for herself.

’she's not thinking like someone who's been the victim of a crime, she's thinking like someone who's committed one: all she can think is that no one must ever know, that she must get rid of all the evidence.’

ana - and nature

✦ her character changed so much and in the best way possible. i thought she was going to be naive and insufferable but she's so much more than that. the circumstances are obviously not the best but i did love seeing how her character developed and loved getting glimpses of her life as well. i did hate how her assault never got talked about, and even though i knew she wouldn't tell maya (since she was dealing with her own) i wish she would have atleast told someone 💔

'sometimes, when she felt really bad, she counted scars. but mostly she just counted faults. she would stand in front of the mirror and point at them: all the things that were wrong about her. sometimes that made it feel more bearable, when she had already said them out loud to herself before anyone at school did.'

peter & kira - the general manager and the lawyer.

✦ the love i have for them is incomprehensible. the way they are their own people, the way they carry themselves and the way they love each other and their kids. the way they spoke about parenthood and the sacrifices that come with it. the way they spoke on child loss, how the mourning never stops. the little glimpses we got of how they kept the memory of isak alive. most of all, i love how they never blamed each other and loved each other throughout it all. so sad and so wholesome, they deserve the best ever.

'kira never stopped making his pulse throb in his throat; he still loves her the way you do when you're a teenager, when your heart swells in your chest and makes you feel like you can't breathe.'

ramona - the crazy old bag

✦ the only character that spoke up for every little thing. she let nothing slide, a queen. loved her as soon as she was introduced. the way she stood up for maya without a moment of hesitation, the way she slapped men for being dumb as fuck, and the way she ate them all up at that meeting 👸 it was so sad how she spoke about her late husband. her pov in chapter 18 and the what she said to sune were everything.

“any living thing that is kept behind bars for long enough eventually becomes more scared of the unknown than its own captivity. at the start she only stayed indoors because she could still hear his laughter in here, his voice, and the way he used to swear when he stubbed his toe on the low step behind the bar. but isolating yourself happens faster than you might think: the days blur together when you live more on the inside than outside, and the years continued to pass by on the other side of the street while she desperately tried to make everything inside the bearskin and the apartment above it carry on exactly as it was when he died. she was frightened she would forget him if she went out into the world, that she might go to the supermarket and come home to find that his laughter was no longer there. then suddenly one morning, eleven years had passed and everyone but her boys thinks she’s lost her mind now. she became a time traveller trapped inside her own machine.”

———

bobo's character growth was absolutely everything. he actually surprised me and i'm so proud of the person he became ❤️‍🩹


maggan you maggot, i wanna kill u and bury you with that maggot ass son of urs too🖕i don't think i have ever hated two irrelevant dumb characters as much as i hate these two.


i hated how it took for a boy to say it for them to believe her, but i did love it because it made it so realistic and this book thrived on realism. everything was written from the heart, every character was thoroughly and perfectly developed.


if you have not read this, or even heard of it, i urge you to please read it! it talks about so much in the most beautiful way possible. i love this book with my entire heart and would not change a thing. all 477 pages were absolutely worth it and would read 1000 more pages of it within a heartbeat. i have no doubts the other two books will eat as much as this if not more.

.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.

➸ 'She knows that one of the funny things about fighting for success is that you never really stop fighting. You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.'

➸ 'And there are no winners without losers, no stars are born without others in the collective being sacrificed.'

➸ 'Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that's always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there's always someone who's freezing.'

➸ 'Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.'

➸ 'At night Kira still goes around the house, counting their children. One, two, three. Two in their beds. One in heaven.'

➸ 'What is a home? It's a place that belongs to you. So can it still be your home if you're no longer welcome there?

➸ How big is the world when you're twelve years old? Both infinte and infinitesimal. It's all your wildest dreams.'

➸ 'what you create, others destroy. create anyway. because in the end, it is between you and God. it was never between you and anyone else anyway.'

➸ "why did I just go around being happy? if only i'd known what was going to happen, could i have stopped it?"

➸ 'bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.'

➸ 'She already knew that the world is a cruel place if you're a girl. Her parents couldn't imagine that this could happen, but Maya simply hadn't expected it to happen to her.'

'People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.'

.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.


'There's a town in a forest that loves a game. There's a girl sitting on a bed playing the guitar for her best friend. There's a young man sitting in a police station trying not to look scared.

A team is waiting in a locker room, sticks in hand, waiting for a game to start. A little brother is waiting on a bench with a phone in his lap, waiting to see what his friends will write about his sister on the Internet when they find out what's happened.