"You can't live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it." 

Wowowow!  Where do I begin with "Beartown". This is my first Fredrick Backman book. I had heard numerous things about his writing style and that you will either love or hate it.  If his writing style/format is like this in his other books - I am here for it!!! 

I love that we would get numerous character plot points within the same chapter sometimes even twice a chapter. So the wait to know what is going though is not that long.  Which is also a con because there were a lot of characters in this book and you have to remember who does what when until you are really wrapped up into the story to know. 

The book starts off with a foreshadow of the future and it hooks you right away. 

I will admit that I did struggle to get my reading in for this but when I was focused, the pages flew by. There were so many things going on in all these different characters life and they all made sense by the end.  

I don't want to divulge so much into the story because it would give away but this was a truly wonderful book. My heart belongs forever to Benji. He was my absolute favorite character. Maya is the strongest teenager I think I have ever read about. The whole Andersson family is quite extraordinary.  Peter and his family on the other hand was disgusting and that's all I'll say about that. Amat & Bobo are amazing as well. 

I am rating it at 4.75 only because it did take me a bit to get through and was a little wordy but it could potentially be bumped up to a 5 if I keep thinking about it and letting it sink in more. 

The book did not leave off on a cliffhanger but there is a sequel to this which I will be reading as soon as I can. There was some tidbits in the last few pages that foreshadow the next book and I need to know the answers. 

I flagged so much of the book because the way Backman wrote; everything was pretty much a quote. It was insane. But this one stood out especially as an adult this resonates with me: "Because friendship is both complicated and not complicated at all." 

Bonus: Storygraph has an amazing Buddy Read feature which allowed my friend Cam and I to leave comments for each other as we read.