Fredrik Backman does a dazzling job tying together how the big dreams of individual hockey players and the community in which they live are deeply and desperately entwined, until one day when someone pulls the wrong string and unravels everything — first the life of a young girl, then the junior team bound for a national championship, and then the entire hockey town that stands to gain or lose everything. Beartown is the story of a moral failure and how people are forced to choose sides not based on right or wrong but based the relationships they have made and knowing the fate of one could be inexplicably tied to all the others. It is a story that is riveting in its conviction to demonstrate that an act against one person has the potential to produce has many victims, especially those who have the courage to step forward.