August 11, 2025

I finished reading Us Against You by Fredrik Backman over the weekend. It is the second book in the Beartown trilogy. The series centers around hockey life in a small town, so there’s a lot to like and a lot going on.

I won’t list any spoilers, I just wanted to point out a couple passages I really liked:

“Sons want their fathers’ attention until the precise moment when fathers want their sons’. From then on we’re all doomed to wish that we’d fallen asleep beside them more often, while their head could still fit on our chest. That we’d spent more time sitting on the floor while they were playing.”

-From chapter 24, page 211 of the paperback edition

As a parent of a recent 18 year-old and 15 year-old, I feel this.

“Grief is a wild animal that drags us so far out into the darkness that we can’t imagine ever getting home again.”

-From chapter 48, page 418 of the paperback edition

Wow, just an very powerful description of what grief feels like.