A Man Called Ove

I know a lot of Oves. You can call them a lot of things—-grumps...curmudgeons—-but there is more to them than appears on the surface. People like Sonja look past the surface and see the depth there. It's the charm of the story, seeing past the awful surface to the depth below, and looking closely at people who are able to do that.

Some of the thoughts I took away from the book:

After her father died, Sonja tells Ove, “You have to love me twice as much now.”

After her child was killed in an accident and she becomes a teacher, Sonja tells Ove, “God took a child from me. But he gave me a thousand others.”

The journalist tells Ove, “The first people to break laws in a bureaucracy are always the bureaucrats themselves.”