Beartown by Fredrick Backmen, and Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid, are both hockey novels that aren’t about hockey. But which book’s hockey-not-hockey story will keep the fans in the stands anyway?
Beartown follows multiple people in a small town in northern Sweden as they live through the struggles of their daily lives. Heated Rivalry is about two professional hockey players: Shane Hollander from Canada, and Ilya Rozanov from Russia, who both have to navigate both their careers and their growing relationship.
Based on those descriptions, you might be thinking that Beartown is the most painfully boring book ever written, but you’d have the wrong novel.
HEATED RIVALRY:
Heated Rivalry is a masterclass in squandering a premise. The book is advertised as an enemies-to-lovers story about two hockey stars. Despite this, hockey spent the first 150 pages of the novel on the bench.
As for the relationship between the characters, it is described as having them be enemies or rivals; this is clearly shown by Ilya being a total jerk to everyone all the time and Shane being mildly upset on occasion with the fact that Ilya’s team wins sometimes. Truly a very heated rivalry.
One of the first things I noticed while reading this book was the writing, and because I took an English class in sixth grade, I noticed that it wasn’t very good. The book tells you everything that happens, “Yeah, duh, that’s what it’s supposed to do, Lily”; well to that I say, “Show don’t tell, snarky reader”.
Following the very simple and straightforward prose, every setting described in the book is told only through what building they are in and the title of the city at the beginning of every chapter. The city is beautifully accompanied by the year, making the perfect formatting for the most untimely timeskips known to man.
These time skips that take place in the darkness of not-wanting-to-write-the-scene-land are the perfect place to put events such as the hockey games that they don’t play, Ilya having family trouble, and Shane breaking up with his unnamed girlfriend 38 pages into the book. The girlfriend was only introduced four pages before and is never mentioned again throughout the book.
Between pages 50 through 140, the two hypothetically play hockey and sleep together with no feelings whatsoever.
We have now reached part three of the story, and things are getting juicy. Exactly like you’re juicing a cracker. However, this plotless, boring cracker just got an upgrade. Fans from all over the chair I’m sitting on are wondering, is there a new writer in town or did this book finally find an editor?
This section of the book begins with the most incredible turn of events, a true, real, on-page hockey game, as well as an unbelievable increase in writing quality. The characters start to think not entirely horrendous thoughts about each other, and a genuinely sweet relationship begins to grow.
Unfortunately, this budding love is irrevocably tainted by the first half of the novel’s solely physical relationship built on jealousy and loneliness.
Potentially the most upsetting part of this novel is that it is advertised as a fantastic representation of the LGBTQ+ community. The story is meant to discuss the hardships of coming out as queer in an incredibly conservative sport.
However, in this book alone (I have not read the other books in the series and do not know if it is discussed more in them), this concept is only mentioned on occasion instead of being properly observed and unpacked.
Along with the threadbare representation of gay men, the representation of women, English language learners, and non-white characters was either nonexistent or in some cases completely abhorrent.
All-in-all I did not enjoy the novel, and in case you hadn’t noticed, the book made me both uncomfortable and unbelievably bored. 2/10 for having queer representation in conservative spaces. Minus eight points for everything actually written in the book.
BEARTOWN:
Beartown, while not being a romance novel, involves many different character studies and explores multiple different aspects of humanity. While the book follows a hockey team (unlike Heated Rivalry, this team actually plays hockey), it truly follows the effect of this hockey team on the people of its town.
The story is told from a narrative perspective that is written to make it seem as if it’s being told by the town itself. And I must say, the town paints a lovely picture.
The characters that we follow change every few paragraphs, and while this should cause the same amount of whiplash as the time skips in Heated Rivalry, the writing flows so smoothly that transitioning from one side of town to the other feels more like skating across ice.
Beartown differs again with a truly realistic and believable romantic relationship; a husband and wife, Peter and Kira, are only shown on page together for a quarter of the book but have ten times as much chemistry as the Ilya and Shane who have a whole novel dedicated to their relationship.
The author in this book stays the same throughout, but that’s alright because he’s a pretty good writer.
The novel also contains an excellent representation of what it is like to be a woman, a gay man in hockey, a lower class citizen, and many more states of humanity. Kira is an excellent example of this because she is the wife of the General Manager of the Beartown hockey club (Peter) and to most of the people in the town, that’s all she is.
However, the book and her character make it very clear that she is so much more. She is a highly successful lawyer who could single handedly support her family and pay my college tuition. While every character in this novel connected with me on some level, Kira was the one I found the most attachment to.
10/10 book, I loved everything about it despite the severe dehydration I suffered from how much I cried while reading it.
While I did not enjoy Heated Rivalry, I do not think that it is harmful to anyone who reads it, and it can make a fun trashy read if that’s your goal. That being said, I am not a queer man and cannot speak from their point of view on the representation shown.
I do think that Beartown is not only an excellently written novel but can bring some nuance and differing perspectives into people’s lives. As a woman and someone who has experienced some of the things described in the book, it made me feel seen in a way I didn’t know I needed.
