353. Us Against You
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Fredrik Backman
Genre: Fiction
448 pages, published June 5, 2018
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
Us Against You is the sequel to Beartown, a book by Swedish author Frederik Backman that takes place in a small town in Sweden that lives and dies for youth hockey. All the same characters from Beartown are back with new conflicts and drama and lots of hockey.
Quotes
“Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.”
“He’s twelve years old, and this summer he learns that people will always choose a simple lie over a complicated truth, because the lie has one unbeatable advantage: the truth always has to stick to what actually happened, whereas the lie just has to be easy to believe.”
“The worst thing we know about other people is that we’re dependent upon them. That their actions affect our lives. Not just the people we choose, the people we like, but all the rest of them: the idiots. You who stand in front of us in every line, who can’t drive properly, who like bad television shows and talk too loud in restaurants and whose kids infect our kids with the winter vomiting bug at preschool. You who park badly and steal our jobs and vote for the wrong party. You also influence our lives, every second.”
“The complicated thing about good and bad people alike is that most of us can be both at the same time.”
“It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. Hate is so simple that it always ought to win. It’s an uneven fight.”
“Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.”
“Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control.”
“They run only where there are lights. They don’t say anything but are both thinking the same thing: guys never think about light, it just isn’t a problem in their lives. When guys are scared of the dark, they’re scared of ghosts and monsters, but when girls are scared of the dark, they’re scared of guys.”
“Unfairness is a far more natural state in the world than fairness.”
“Being a mother can be like drying out the foundations of a house or mending a roof: it takes time, sweat, and money, and once it’s done everything looks exactly the same as it did before. It’s not the sort of thing anyone gives you praise for.”
“The best friends of our childhoods are the loves of our lives, and they break our hearts in worse ways.”
“It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.”
“What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything.”
“Anyone who devotes his life to being the best at one single thing will be asked, sooner or later, the same question: “Why?” Because if you want to become the best at something, you have to sacrifice everything else.”
“At some point almost everyone makes a choice. Some of us don’t even notice it happening, most don’t get to plan it in advance, but there’s always a moment when we take one path instead of another, which has consequences for the rest of our lives. It determines the people we will become, in other people’s eyes as well as our own. Elizabeth Zackell may have been right when she said that anyone who feels responsibility isn’t free. Because responsibility is a burden. Freedom is a pleasure.”
“Two drowning people with lead weights around their ankles may not be each other’s salvation; if they hold hands, they’ll just sink twice as fast. In the end the weight of carrying each other’s broken hearts becomes unbearable.”
“Sons want their fathers’ attention until the precise moment when fathers want their sons’.”
My Take
While I’m a big fan of Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove, Beartown), I liked, but did not love Us Against You. The characters, dialogue, ideas and conflicts are interesting at times, but it is re-plowing the same ground as Beartown, a superior book.
