My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman

Rating: 4.5 of 5

“Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero. That’s just how it is.“

A touching story about the power of second chances and the special relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren.

Elsa is an obstinate, precocious almost-eight-year-old whose only friend is her seventy-seven-year-old Granny. I loved them both immediately!

Every human being deserves to have (at least) one person who sees them for exactly who they are and accepts them for everything they are. These two are exactly that for each other. So beautiful!

Granny goes to battle for Elsa every time Elsa needs her to. They have their own secret language and their own world of fairy tales. Granny is Elsa’s best friend, so when Granny dies, Elsa is broken. But just before she dies, Granny gives Elsa an envelope with a key and asks her to deliver it to The Monster in their building. The adventure to deliver the envelope leads Elsa on the greatest treasure hunt of her life, and one that will not only mend her broken heart but maybe help fix a few other broken people as well.

Elsa carries a red felt-tip pen at all times, so she can right the grammar wrongs of the world as she encounters them. She reads only “quality literature” some of which includes Spider-Man comics and the Harry Potter series. She refers to her unborn sibling as Halfie because 1) her mum and stepdad don’t want to know the sex before birth and 2) she/he will be her step-sibling. She fact-checks almost everything using Wikipedia. She gets bullied at school, both physically and emotionally, but she has her Granny and that’s enough for her.

I loved Granny’s fairy tales. I loved how Granny was completely mad but in a good way. I loved the way Granny refused to let anyone mistreat Elsa. I loved that Granny was a female surgeon during an era when that was unheard of. I loved that she went all over the world to help children. I laughed at her antics over and over again, and I cried at her posthumous atonement.

Every character in this book is their own person and it was easy to remember them and tell them apart. Mother-daughter relationships, jealousy, regret, bullying, aging, sexism, war…

Highly recommended if you enjoy reading from a “very grown-up for her age,” almost-eight-year-old’s perspective including the way she blurs reality with fantasy.

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(Review cross-posted on LibraryThing and Goodreads.)

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The words that resonated most with me:

In response to the teachers at Elsa’s school saying she has concentration issues. “So the teachers are wrong. Elsa has no problems concentrating. She just concentrates on the right things.” (p. 47)

In response to why she gets bullied. “People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. ‘They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.’ As if that’s how oppression works.” (p. 80)

“All fairy stories take their life from the fact of being different. ‘Only different people change the world,’ Granny used to say. ‘No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.'” (p. 89)

“Elsa remembers how Granny said that ‘the best stories are never completely realistic and never entirely made-up.’ That was what Granny meant when she called certain things ‘reality-challenged.’ To Granny, there was nothing that was entirely one thing or another. Stories were completely for real and at the same time not.” (p.171)

“It’s snowing again, and Elsa decides that even if people she likes have been shits on earlier occasions, she has to learn to carry on liking them. You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits.” (p. 315)

“She goes silent. Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters than their daughters want from them.” (p. 352)

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My biggest complaint, [spoiler]and the thing that stressed me out whilst reading, was that they kept feeding all those sweets to the wurse (a dog). I sure hope the author doesn’t actually feed his pets chocolate and ice cream and sponge cake mix![/spoiler]