Us Against You by Fredrik Backman ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In Us against You Fredrik Backman does something very rare. He takes everything you learned in the first book of his duology and uses it to maximum effect without making you feel like he was just trying to sell another book. This book follows his Beartown, which was good but not quite five stars for me. 

So what bumped this one up that final star? I liked the subtlety of it. He picks up right where Beartown left off and is able to move his story forward without losing any momentum. Beartown did resolve to an ending (a book with cliffhangers will very rarely get more than two stars from me), but Backman left himself plenty of story, should he decide to pick up the threads.

And pick them up he did. Both books tell the story of the people in a very small rural town in Sweden. You only need to know one thing about the town: hockey is everything there. All of the town’s pride is wrapped up in the sport—past, present, and future. The first book revolves around a crime that takes place, involving the town’s star hockey player and the coach’s daughter. While the story does resolve in Beartown, Us Against You brings it to its full potential.

Backman’s strength is in the characters he creates. Without bowing to extreme stereotypes, he deftly brings his readers home to where his people live. The characters combine into collective forces to become, well, us against you. There is workplace drama, family dynamics, powerful friendships, dreams of glory. Plenty of dreams of glory. And what they can do to a town completely blind to their destructive side.

The power in this story comes from the exploration of human nature and what happens when the drive to win overtakes absolutely everything else. You do not need to know a thing about hockey to love both of these books. Hockey isn’t really the story here but the vehicle in which the psychology of the story is set. I cannot imagine a reader who wouldn’t marvel at these finely crafted novels, and so I recommend them without reservation to all readers.