If you like heartwarming stories with feel good endings, you’ll enjoy A Man Called Ove. Backman includes a whole range of characters that cover the spectrum of society. You are guaranteed to find yourself in someone or be reminded of someone you know, and isn’t that what reading is all about?

Fredrik Backman is a master of hinting at everything that is coming. As I read, I take guesses as to why Ove keeps mentioning his wife, yet she never presents herself, and isn’t it odd that he is going to install a hook in the middle of the ceiling…I think I have a guess as to why he’s doing that as well. It reminds me of reading The Lottery by Shirley Jackson with my kiddos at school. She is basically giving it all away if they would only pay attention to the clues! But they never do, and in the end, they always realize they haven’t won anything spectacular, only a death by stoning. Congratulations, now pelt your peer with your waded up paper. 

I hesitate to guess that Ove’s wife is dead, and Ove is probably planning to kill himself. For some reason I worry that I am wrong, and I start trying to convince myself that I have no idea what’s coming. Or maybe, I am trying to convince myself I am wrong because I want to be wrong. In the end, I learn that I can teach my students to take guesses whether they are wrong or not, as long as they can back up their guesses with text evidence.

He has breakfast and listens to the radio. Washes up and wipes down the counter. …Turns off all the lights. Checks that the coffee percolator is unplugged. Puts on the blue jacket over his suit… Locks the shed and the front door…

As a grammar teacher, I usually get irritated by short, choppy fragments, but Backman was clever to punctuate in a manner befitting of Ove, a man with no understanding of saying more than needed to be said. Ove is matter of fact, and now and then so is Backman’s writing when it needs to be. The sentences, or lack thereof, perfectly personify Ove and remind me that I can allow my students and myself the freedom to write in this way as well if there is a purpose for it. I want them to write with purpose.

Quickly she wipes her eyes and blinks away the pain. As women of her generation do.

The story is a tale of generations colliding, and I can’t help but get weepy thinking of my grandparents as I read. My grandfathers didn’t have personalities like Ove, but they would definitely understand his ways, his sense of working hard because that’s what men do, and learning trades, because, well, that’s what men do. I crack up each time Ove mutters “Good God” when characters don’t know what they should very well know. Each character learns from Ove, and Ove learns from them, reluctantly of course.

I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.

I bawled. I can’t say which chapters made me cry or that it was the story in particular that did it. It might be life, whatever I am dealing with now or have dealt with before this, but I bawled and bawled reading this story. It reminded me that life is incredibly unfair, but there is always a veritable explosion of color to be found beyond the moments of black.

Both titles pictured above are available for purchase at our shop! 
-Lindsay