Book Review | The Deal of a Lifetime by Fredrik Backman
The Deal of a Lifetime shares how precious life is and how quickly that can change in an instant.
About The Deal of a Lifetime
A father and son are finally seeing each other eye to eye, after years of arguments. He wants to tell his son a story before it’s too late. He tells him of a young, brave girl who’s lying in a hospital bed and knows that drawing with crayons won’t make the cancer go away but as it makes the adults happy, she continues to do it.
When the father witnesses a woman with a clipboard go into the little girl’s room, he gets the chance to do something remarkable for her. But before he can make the deal of a lifetime, he must find out what his own life has actually been worth, and only his son can reveal that answer.
The Deal of a Lifetime Review
I adored the premise of The Deal of a Lifetime. The story encapsulates how precious life is and how quickly that can change in an instant.
The illustrations laced between each chapters was a nice addition.
One thing I adore about Backman’s books is the creation of his characters and unfortunately in short stories, there are not a lot of pages for me to get to know them. I found the father in The Deal of a Lifetime slightly underdeveloped. There was a lot of talk about how he was not a good parent to his son, but the author did not show how he wasn’t a good parent. It was difficult for me to believe what the narrator was trying to prove to me when there wasn’t enough evidence to back up his claim.
There also wasn’t much information given about the little girl suffering from cancer, which is crucial for the reader to understand and empathise with the father’s decisions later on in the book.
Backman’s writing is usually phenomenal but this one lacked it for me. The emotions I usually get from his other books could not be found here. In fact, I found the author’s note to be more emotional than the story itself.
Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it's not home anymore.
As a Backman fan, this one was slightly disappointing but I adored the little insights into Backman’s personal life, such as the places he’s been to and grew up in, squeezed in there.
The Deal of a Lifetime Recommendation
★★★☆☆ (3/5)
If you’re short on time, this book is ideal for you. It’s a short 65-page book that only took me 50 minutes to complete.
About Fredrik Backman
Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, and a novella, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer. His books are published in more than forty countries. He lives in Stockholm with his wife and two children.
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