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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Beartown, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Community Breakdown and Inequality
Culture, Character, and Entitlement
Parents and Children
Loyalty and Belonging
Resistance and Courage
Summary
Analysis
It’s a Friday in early March. Everyone in Beartown, Sweden, anticipates tomorrow’s hockey game—the junior team is playing in the semifinal of a national youth tournament. In most places, something like that wouldn’t be so important, but Beartown is different.
The story rewinds to several weeks earlier. Youth hockey is a big deal in this small town; it’s embedded in the culture of the place. From the beginning, Beartown is like a character in itself, and its relationship with hockey is established here as a key to the conflict in the novel.
Active
Themes
The town wakes early; it’s cold and snowing. Lines of tired people wait to clock in at the factory; commuters head for bigger towns beyond the forest. In the distance, everyone in town can hear a “bang-bang-bang.”
There’s immediately a sense that Beartown’s economy is somewhat depressed, only able to sustain limited jobs. The mysterious, recurrent “bang” in the background becomes like a soundtrack for town life, though its source is kept hidden for now.
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Themes
When 15-year-old Maya wakes up, she stays in bed, playing her guitar. Her guitar is her first love and what helps her put up with Beartown life. Her father, Peter, is the general manager of the town’s hockey team, and although Maya hates hockey, she understands her father’s passion, seeing hockey as “just a different instrument from hers.” She figures that life in a hockey town is predictable, at least.
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Beartown is losing—jobs, houses, population, and even the hockey team. Four generations ago, factory workers built a hockey rink here. Even now, the stands are packed each weekend, as “everyone hopes that when the team’s fortunes improve once again, the rest of the town will get pulled up with it.”
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Accordingly, the town places its hope in its young people. The junior hockey team is coached with the same values upon which the town was built: “work hard, take the knocks, don’t complain […] and show the bastards in the big cities where we’re from.”
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Amat is almost 16. His tiny bedroom is covered with posters of NHL players, with the exception of a photo of himself playing hockey at age seven, and a handwritten prayer that a nurse had whispered to Amat’s mother, Fatima, after his birth. It’s said to be a prayer cherished by Mother Teresa, and one of its lines reads, “All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.” Amat is not as tall or as strong as the town’s other hockey players, but nobody moves as fast as he does. Hockey skates feel natural to him.
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More than 20 years ago, Beartown’s A-team (a step above the junior team) was second-best in the country, which explains why the juniors’ impending semi-final is so important to the town. Beartown is dominated by a neighborhood of expensive lakeview houses, mostly the homes of business owners or those who commute to bigger towns. People in those other towns don’t understand how anyone could survive in a small forest community like Beartown. Many Beartown residents are wondering the same thing. But when they wake up to the sound of a “bang,” they smile.
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