My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
Ratings112
Average rating4
Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy—as in standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-strangers crazy. She is also Elsa’s best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.
When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure begins. Her grandmother’s instructions lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and old crones but also to the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other.
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is told with the same comic accuracy and beating heart as Fredrik Backman’s bestselling debut novel, A Man Called Ove. It is a story about life and death and one of the most important human rights: the right to be different.
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This one took me a while to get into, but it turned out to be a sweet story. It portrayed the messiness, pain, and sorrow of life through the eyes of a feisty 7 year old as she gets to know her eclectic neighbors. Three quotes from the book really hit home for me:
1) If you don't like people, they can't hurt you.
2) Death's greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.
3) If people you like have been shits on earlier occasions, you have to learn to carry on liking them. You'd quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who had some point have been shits.
People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn't true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn't be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.
— While I liked the central story, I wasn't really fond of the way it was executed, what with the fairy tale story mirroring the real events in the book and all. I just couldn't get into it.
This one is tough to review! I'm giving it 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 (because Jeffrey Bezos refuses to give us half stars). Some parts made me roll my eyes, some parts made me cry. I'm going to keep this short because I don't really have anything insightful. The 7-year-old main character was definitely precocious (as I think she was meant to be), but sometimes too much to the point of annoyance. And that just made me think maybe she wasn't wise, she was just a brat. But then it's also a lovely found family story, a story of grief and love and choices and anger and friendship and really getting to know people and realizing they all have a story instead of just judging them by what you see.
This was my first Backman and I'd like to read another. I can't quite tell if I enjoyed this one or not.
