Themes
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
Tails gets home from work, thinking about the fact that he’s the only sponsor who doesn’t seem to have quickly switched his allegiance from Beartown to Hed. As he comes into the house, he hears his son and daughter arguing over a phone charger. Then his 12-year-old son yells at his sister that she doesn’t have any boys to call anyway, saying: “Everyone knows you WISH you’d been raped.” Before he realizes what’s happening, Tails has tackled his terrified son, and they’re both on the floor crying. Tails keeps repeating, “You can’t become that sort of man […] you need to be better than me.”
Tails’s extreme reaction suggests that the connection between the hockey club culture and the events of the past few weeks have fully gotten through to him, and that he wants to break that cycle, starting with acknowledging his own failure to teach his son adequately. The fact that such a young boy would make this offensive statement also shows how widespread the toxicity of the town’s hockey culture has become.
Themes
Fatima drives Amat to Hed in a car she’s borrowed from Bobo’s parents. Amat goes inside and spends the stack of kronor. Later, when Maya gets home, she finds a beautiful new guitar waiting for her.
Instead of hockey skates, Amat gets Maya a gift. It’s an especially touching gesture because Amat doesn’t have any reason to think that Maya would be interested in him—he just wants her to have something meaningful.
Themes
Tails goes to visit Ramona in the Bearskin. He tells her that he’s selling his store in Hed in order to help save the Beartown hockey club, and he wants Ramona to sit on the new board. She gets herself a cup of coffee, saying that if she’s going to do that, it’ll take her a few months to sober up.
Tails has had a turnaround over the course of the story—showing that not everyone in the hockey club is stuck in their ways. The appointment of Ramona also represents a fundamental shift in the governance of Beartown hockey.
Themes
