I picked this up because someone said it was “uplifting.” That word usually makes me nervous. Uplifting books tend to be fake. This one isn’t.
Here’s the setup. A bank robbery goes wrong. Not guns-blazing, but just incompetently executed. The robber tries to rob a cashless bank, panics, runs into an open house, and ends up holding eight strangers hostage. The apartment is full of people who showed up to look at a place they can’t afford. There’s a married couple who hate each other, a wealthy older woman who says exactly what she thinks, a young gay couple waiting for their first baby, a retired actor who can’t stop lying, a woman in a rabbit mask (seriously), and a banker who might have caused the whole mess.
The book jumps between the hostage crisis and the two cops trying to solve it. The cops are father and son. The father is about to retire. The son is trying not to screw up. They’re both terrible at their jobs in a way that’s endearing.
What makes the book work is not the plot. It’s the people. Backman gives you nine broken characters and slowly shows you how each one got broken. The woman who seems cold? She’s just exhausted from taking care of everyone. The husband who seems angry? He’s terrified of losing his family. The robber who seems like a criminal? They’re just a parent who ran out of options.
“Sometimes the best way to help someone is just to sit next to them and not say anything.”
The book is funny, but not in a ha ha way. More in a “I’m laughing because otherwise I’d cry” way. Backman writes dialogue that sounds like actual people talking. They interrupt each other. They say the wrong thing. They apologize. They don’t apologize. It’s messy.
Here’s the thing that got me. I spent the whole book convinced I knew who the robber was. Turns out I was right, and at the same time, completely wrong. Backman does this thing that’s hard to explain without making it sound cheap — but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re actually reading it. He just points you in the wrong direction. Which is kind of what the whole book is about. We don’t see people. We see whoever we’ve already decided they are.
The middle section feels slow; the hostage interviews are prolonged, and some side characters appear to exist primarily to illustrate a point. But then the last hundred pages hit and I couldn’t put it down. I cried twice. I really don’t cry at books.
I recognized myself in it more than I expected to. That constant feeling that everyone’s judging you. We rehearse conversations in our heads before they happen. Backman’s point is that this is just normal — everyone’s doing it. The anxious person isn’t the strange one. Just the one who says it out loud.
Read it if you want to feel less alone in your own head. Skip it if you’re looking for a thriller, because it’s really not one. It’s more about how nobody’s quite as good at being a person as they pretend to be. And somehow that’s the most comforting thing about it.
