A Delightful and Most Charming Story
Elsa is seven-going-on-eight, and different. Granny is seventy-seven years old, and nutty. They are best friends and love each other dearly. Elsa admits only to herself that her granny is her ONLY friend, as her school chums think her strange and are mean to her. Elsa's strangeness is only in the fact that she is extremely smart and very grown-up for her age (constantly looking words up on Wikipedia!). Her world revolves around her grandmother, her parents, adventures in the fairy tales granny tells, and her admiration for superheros and Harry Potter.
Elsa's parents are divorced and she sees her dad every-other-weekend. The rest of the time she lives with her mom, who is expecting a baby, and George on the top floor of a 4-story flat across the hall from her grandmother. The rest of the apartment building is filled with a strange mixture of people we learn about as time goes on.
The Land-of-Almost-Awake
For quite some years, Granny has been telling fairy tales to Elsa to help her go to sleep and get her to practice Granny's secret language. The fairy tales take place in the "Land-of-Almost-Awake" and the "Kingdom of Miamas" where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.
Later, Elsa's grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged. The letters are entrusted to Elsa to deliver, bringing about her greatest adventure ever. The stories of the people who live in the apartment building, including a brave dog who is very much like the 'wurse' in the Kingdom of Miamas, are revealed to us one by one. As each letter is delivered we learn the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other.
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry was written by Fredrik Backman, a native of Sweden who lives in Stockholm. This is only his second novel, but you get the feeling from this well-written story that he has been writing for a very long time.
His first novel is A Man Called Ove, which became a #1 bestseller in Sweden. *Note: When Backman's second book was first published in England in 2014, it had the title: My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises.
My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry is an absolutely charming story filled with humor and wisdom, and with a glimpse into a fairy tale world we all wish we could visit. I took Elsa and her grandmother so much to heart that when I finished the book I wanted to immediately go back to page one and read it all over again. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you will fall in love with these delightful characters. I highly recommend this book.
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