I understand Beartown: Always the afterthought, populated by misfits and hard-working scrappers, looking down the road with envy at Hed, the town next door that always gets the money, the jobs, the attention. Anyone who grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, just down the road from Kalamazoo, as I did, understands the dynamic. Throw in a rivalry between the towns’ two ice-hockey clubs, populate the story with the kinds of characters that both small towns and ice hockey attract, and you have a surprising, insightful, emotional book that is about so much more than sports.

When we first are introduced to Beartown, the community is on a nervous high, waiting for the town’s junior ice-hockey team to compete in a huge national semifinal game. For once, the team—and by extension, the town—has a real chance to come out a winner, thanks to Kevin, the star player, and the Beartown team that has grown up around him. But things don’t go quite as planned: as the game approaches, the community is split apart by a violent act. The decisions that must be made as a result test the loyalty and ethics of Beartown’s residents.

I loved Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove (see Kristie’s review here) so much that I was afraid that I would be disappointed by this book. Silly me. Backman’s deep understanding of emotions, motivations, and relationships made A Man Called Ove shine in its portrayal of an individual; with Beartown, the author masterfully depicts an entire community, making us feel that we know each member, that we’ve sat with them in the Bearskin pub and listened to their innermost thoughts. We root for them to do the right thing, and care about them even when they don’t. We understand the mistakes they make, even if we sometimes find it hard to forgive them.

Backman’s extraordinarily pleasurable writing is worth spending time with, no matter what the subject, and if I were the sort of person who highlights great sentences in a book, Beartown’s pages would have been glowing like a radioactive lemon. The author’s insightful offhand comments and wry humor mark every passage. But perhaps the most unexpected aspect of this book with a boys’ sport at its core was its feminist streak–subtle at first, but by the end of the story, there’s no missing it.

If you know the world of ice hockey well, Backman’s portrayal of the coaches, players, parents, and fans will have you nodding your head and grinning in recognition. But even if you don’t know a faceoff from an offsides, Beartown’s story resonates with its examination of family, community, sacrifice, and what it means to be a good person.