Gems about culture and life from Fredrick Backman's "Beartown" book series

The Beartown series (Beartown, Us Against You, The Winners) from Swedish author Fredrik Backman tackles family, culture, community, and loyalty after the rape of a high school girl by the town’s star hockey player. The typical good, bad and ugly has never been better aligned.

Beartown begins with a gun to someone’s head in the woods near a junior-league-hockey-obsessed town in remote Sweden. Through all three novels, the characters evolve through hypocrisy, loyalty, and politics. More intense than Backman's other books, its quotable quotes deliver:

Parenting (Beartown): “It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.” / “Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone."

Family (The Winners): “You know, all my thoughts about morals and ethics boil down to one single thing: not if it concerns your family. You can have a thousand principles, but not if it concerns your family, That's what you protect first and foremost..."

Community (Beartown): “And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.” / (Us Against You) “Culture isn't just what we encourage but what we allow to happen.”

Culture/Sports Culture (Beartown): “We love winners, even though they’re very rarely particularly likable people. They’re almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate. That doesn’t matter. We forgive them. We like them while they’re winning.”

Rape Culture (Beartown): “For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.” / “She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman”.

Expectations (Us Against You): “Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.”

Fear and anxiety (Us Against You): “Anxiety. It owns us but leaves no trace.”

Legacy/Purpose (The Winners): “One day you will be one of the people who lived long ago." / “You always find something, somewhere, and then you fight for it to the death."