Let me first say I ADORE everything I’ve read by Fredrick Backman. Everything. Even the ones like Britt-Marie Was Here which wasn’t my favorite of his, didn’t make me ugly-cry like A Man Called Ove or And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, but I still could appreciate and enjoy. Until now. Now there is The Deal of a Lifetime and I can’t say I love everything Backman anymore.
By this I mean, I really didn’t like it. I’d have to say Ove and Every Morning are probably two of my favorite books ever, so I had such high hopes even for this being only a short novella. Yet, this story just didn’t grab me. I guess when it was originally published, The Deal of a Lifetime was serialized in a newspaper in Backman’s hometown in Sweden and I guess I could see it going over better in that format. Maybe waiting for each installment might make snippets of this more profound? Yeah, no. Even then I don’t think so.
As it is, though, I wanted more character development of the Scrooge-like dad, the distant son, the sick girl, and especially the woman in gray (such an unusual personification of death or its harbingers!). In fact, I feel like the woman in the gray sweater is really the way I could have fallen in love with this book completely, but instead it just felt like she was merely a potential thread that was dropped. I do realize character development is one of the first things to get cut in a novella-length work, yet it didn’t bother me at all in Every Morning. There, those same character development gaps seemed whimsical and fillable by a reader’s own personal experiences. Here though, I needed more. I wanted to care about the sacrifice being made in this grand entrepreneur’s “deal.” Instead, I felt like I was left with caricatures of real figures with not enough substance and a forced and too-cute for words Christmas-themed redemption plotline more suited to a Hallmark movie.
Like The Clothes Make the Girl (Look Fat?), this book was a birthday gift to me; I only wish I could get my mom’s money back! I have Backman’s latest full-length novel up next on my To Be Read list following The Handmaid’s Tale. Please Beartown, don’t let me down.
Oooooh, disappointing! I’m still gonna read it myself. You liked Brit-Marie? Also, you didn’t mention the Grandmother one, you didn’t like that one much either, did you?
I liked Britt-Marie least (excepting this one of course). Of all the characters in Grandmother, she seemed least deserving of a standalone novel. I didn’t hate it, and I did find myself enjoying it more toward the end as I stayed with it though, so overall, not horrible. Grandmother was ok, but not as good as his others.