Category: Books

Some books you read fast, just to find out what happens. And some books you force yourself to slow down for, because you already know you’ll miss them once they’re over. My Friends was the second kind for me.

I came in with high expectations Backman has this way of writing that seems simple until you realize a sentence just hit you without warning. And this book is no exception, except this time the tone leans more melancholic than the more obvious humor of A Man Called Ove or Anxious People.

The story, no spoilers

The book moves between two timelines. In the present, we meet Louisa: a girl about to turn 18, who grew up moving through foster homes and is grieving the best friend she lost along the way. The only thing of value she carries is a postcard with a reproduction of a famous painting the first thing she ever stole, and also the first beautiful thing she ever really had. An unexpected encounter brings her to Ted, a close friend of the artist who painted that piece, and the two set off on a trip to the coastal town where it all began.

On the other side, we go back twenty-five years, to a summer in a rough port town, where four teenagers Ted, Ali, Joar, and C. Jat met every day on the pier. That’s the summer that gives birth to the painting that, decades later, will tie both stories together.

What hit me the most

What stays with me after closing this book isn’t really the plot it’s the feeling. Backman builds the friendship between the four boys with so much small, specific detail that when things start to hurt for them, it hurts for me too. It’s not a loud kind of pain; it’s more the feeling of recognizing a friendship from your own life on a fictional page.

And there’s this thread about art that I loved: for the four friends, and later for Louisa herself, making something a painting, graffiti on a wall becomes a way to survive the hardest parts of life. It’s not just a book about friendship. It’s a book about how a piece of art can carry an entire story inside it, even when no one else knows it’s there.

What didn’t quite work for me

Being honest: there were parts where Louisa felt less like a person and more like a device for Backman to say what he wanted to say about grief and art. It didn’t pull me out of the book, but I noticed it.

Would I recommend it?

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I’ll admit I picked up this book without knowing quite what to expect. All I knew was that it was short, set in the arid backlands of northeastern Brazil, and that it had a giant saint’s head somewhere in the story. And honestly, that was enough to make me curious.

What it’s about

Samuel loses his mother and, following her deathbed wish, walks nearly twenty days to Candeia, a fictional town in the interior of Ceará, trying to find the grandmother he never met. The welcome is anything but warm she practically throws him out. On a stormy night, with nowhere else to go, he ends up taking shelter in a hole at the top of a hill which turns out to be the hollow head of an unfinished statue of St. Anthony, separated from the rest of the body by a construction failure that was never fixed.

That’s where everything shifts: inside that head, Samuel starts hearing the prayers of local women asking for love. At first it’s just strange. Then it becomes an opportunity with help from Francisco, the first friend he makes in town, he starts “answering” those prayers, and Candeia, which until then seemed frozen in time, slowly comes back to life as people arrive from everywhere chasing this miracle.

What I loved

What stuck with me most is how Socorro Acioli uses such a bizarre, fantastical plot to talk about things that are very real. There’s a sharp, unmissable critique of how people’s faith can be turned into a business and it’s never delivered as a dry lecture, always wrapped in a tone of humor and lightness that keeps the book from getting too heavy. You can laugh in one paragraph and feel a tightness in your chest the next, because of the abandonment Samuel carries with him.

I also loved the setting. Candeia feels real the kind of small interior town you’ve either visited or heard about, full of people with real personality, living at a pace completely different from what we’re used to. The magical realism here doesn’t feel borrowed from other authors; it feels like it was born right there, out of the backlands themselves.

What bothered me (just a little)

Honestly, I felt the ending was a bit rushed. After a book that builds everything with so much care, the final pages seem to want to resolve things too quickly things that deserved more room to breathe. It didn’t ruin the experience for me, but there’s that lingering feeling of “this could have taken a bit longer to close.”

Is it worth reading?

Rating: