Fredrik Backman: Scandal (2018, Penguin Books, Limited)
496 pages
English language
Published Feb. 8, 2018 by Penguin Books, Limited.
No matter how much I try, I simply cannot see the appeal of this book. It was just a lukewarm experience and I simply cannot be bothered to write a full review.
The overall story, important themes and characters worked well, but the writing, especially the repeated use of obvious twists (<spoiler>Zach is going to kill himself, nope!; Bobo is going to help them hurt Amat, nope!; David hates gay people, nope!; etc. The shotgun introduced at the start worked well since there was a long time before the setup and twist. I was fairly convinced from the rape until the hints about his future that Benji was going to kill Kevin since the investigation was clearly going to lack evidence and most other characters had their futures hinted at earlier.</spoiler>) and the unnecessary “deep insights” at the end of each section, let it down. The “insights” felt like the author didn't trust me to take the correct message from a passage and had to explicitly tell me how to think. The best thing I can say about it, and it truly …
A fictional Friday Night Lights set on a Swedish Ice Hockey Rink. A potboiler.
I read this in one day.
I gave I three stars because Backman over uses ominous one liners. That's this first chapter and ok, but the he writes lines like they'll never see each other as children again or she counted her kids two in bed, one in heaven or they'll wish she stayed home that night.
He makes some good observations about losing like a man and how people react to a Penn State like scandal. There's some good quotes in here.
