My Grandmother Told Me to Tell You She’s Sorry

 

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

It’s always quite a big letdown when you read a book that was so heavily praised by so many people, and you just never seemed to get it. This is how I felt after reading this one.  It never really clicked for me. I felt it had potential, but I never really felt the level of emotion I thought I was supposed to feel. I expected this book to tug at my heart in a big way (see the author’s “A Man Called Ove”), yet it simply didn’t do anything for me.  I just never really cared for any of the people in this book and didn’t really feel any kind of emotional attachment nor feelings of really any sort for that matter.

The story is told through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl named Elsa. Elsa is a bit of an odd duck, and her grandmother seems to be the only real friend she has.  Her grandmother is about as eccentric as they come.  Most grandmothers don’t get in trouble when they visit the local zoo for breaking into the animal grounds and throwing animal turds at the police.  So, yes, Grandmother is strange, but when you’re a seven-year-old girl without any friends, such a relative can be quite helpful.

My big problem with Elsa is I found her quite unbelievable.  If author Fredrik Backman had made her a 12-year-old, I think I could have related to her much better.  She seems far too mature, though, for a 7-year-old.  Do 7-year-old girls read Harry Potter? Or Agatha Christie? Or the works of Charles Dickens?  I had trouble reading Charles Dickens when I was forced to during high school, but never mind.

Elsa and her grandmother live in a building with various neighbors, and we learn about all of these strange people. The author does a good job educating his reader with the idiosyncrasies of all of these individuals, and it times, it could be quite humorous since Elsa and her family essentially have to live with all of these misfits.

Anyway, Grandmother isn’t long for this world, and she sets Elsa out to give letters to many of these individuals saying she’s “sorry’ about this or that.  So Elsa learns more about her grandmother’s past as well as her oddball neighbors.  She clings to one particular neighbor referred to as “the monster” and an abandoned dog that Elsa keeps call “The Wurse”.  Why Elsa can’t just call this animal a “dog” is beyond me.

Again, I never really got it. I never really understood this magical deep connection that I was supposed to feel. I never thought that the revelations of Elsa’s grandmother and all of these neighbors was particularly interesting. I simply never cared. It didn’t help that Elsa’s Grandmother invented a bizarre “fantasy” world for Elsa when Elsa was young, and Elsa is always talking about this particular place along with all of the people, animals, and weird descriptions of this bizarre fantasyland.  Again, I simply never cared and found these distractions to be….well….distractions.  Sure, I get it that a lonely seven-year-old needs such diversions to cope with the real world, but these little fantasy interludes just went on too long.

Well, Amazon tells me that most people liked this book better than I did, so if you’ve stumbled across this review, I implore you to read other reviews as well.  Just about any book, no matter how many people love it, will always have a handful of people that didn’t like it or didn’t get it. That would be me for this one.   I simply must remain objective. If you do read this book, I sincerely hope that you enjoy it a lot better than I did.

The Popes – Every Question Answered

 

The Popes – Every Question Answered – Ruppert Matthews

OK. All 267 popes. One book.  So “every question answered” is a blatant lie.  I’m not sure why this is the subtitle.  It’s not accurate, but fortunately doesn’t really hinder the enjoyment of the book.  What this book is, is a very nice compendium of all popes that features some nice illustrations as well as timelines (separate) that give the reader a bit of the picture of what has been going on in the world during the various times of European History.

My guess is the vast majority of historians, even the most devout Roman Catholics, couldn’t tell you much about the majority of the 267 Popes that have held the title since the time of Christ.  In fact, this book is honest when it discusses the earliest pontiffs. Some popes during the first couple of centuries may get a paragraph or so, and that’s about it.  We simply know very little. The most notable popes may get 4-6 pages on average, some perhaps 8-10, but even that is rare.  So a very concise history that talks about the man, the times, and the events.

Ah the events.  Sadly, this is where we discover that the papal history hasn’t always been squeaky clean, yet one really shouldn’t expect that when Western Europe essentially existed as a theocracy.  We mainly read about the relations of each pope with various emperors and kings, the rivals, the factions, and the ugly wars. It’s essentially all political. As depressing as such events are to read, it’s also a bit of a hindrance that history basically repeated itself for the mass majority of time during the last two centuries.  It seemed as though it wasn’t until around the 18^th century or so that popes started to act…you know…Christlike as opposed to wielding political power and waging inquisitions and crusades against the infidel Muslims or the pesky Protestants.  It doesn’t help when it seemed every pope had the name Innocent, Gregory, Benedict or Pious.   Every emperor and king seemed to have the name Charles, Louis, or Henry. So it was very easy to get lost when going though thousands of years of history at quite the rapid pace with all of these repeated names. It’s so much easier to read all this history if you have a significant difference in people’s names such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Kennedy.

This book might be better served as a reference book as opposed to a straightforward historical account.  As stated though, since each pope only gets a few pages, it might be better to research a Wikipedia entry if one is really curious about a particular pontiff.  It was still overall interesting, and I also found it refreshing that the author was not an apologist for many of the “bad” popes, yet he doesn’t have a malodorous feeling towards these individuals as what tends to happen in modern, evangelical Christianity. It was a balanced retrospective.

I’m not sure if it was because I read the book on a Kindle, but the illustrations were rather tiny, and I think a book such as this could be much more rewarding with more illustrations such as paintings and pictures of the various places where the popes hailed from, or served in a significant capacity.  I’m sure such “illustrated” books actually exist, and that might be more to one’s liking. When reading about so many unfamiliar people and places, it’s nice to have illustrations to give the reader more of a feeling – even if many of the illustrations are quite primitive due to the early time period.

The book goes all the way to Pope Francis, so at some point, unless future editions are released, a book like this might not be as complete 50 years in the future.  But if you’re reading any time around the time I’m writing (2022), it’s updated and fresh. 

The last section of this book has various Papal Bulls and teachings of the many popes.  It’s a bit laborious of a read (I actually just skimmed most of them), but it does serve, again, as a somewhat nice reference. “Every question answered?”  Definitely not. But a good quick handy reference of two thousand years of popes.

Lost

 

Lost  by Michael Robotham

The title of this book, sadly, describes precisely how I felt the majority of the time that I was reading it. Author Michael Robotham recently became highly recommended to me, and the first book that I read by him “The Secrets That She Keeps” was highly enjoyable.  I wish I could say the same for this effort.

This is a book where the author tries a unique way of telling his tale. Underneath the intended labyrinth, what we have is a pretty straight-forward detective story. Vincent Ruiz worked on a case several years ago concerning an abducted child.  All the evidence seemed to point to a somewhat-loner that lived in the same building as the girl and her family.  A trial was conducted, and the man was found guilty and sent to prison. Case closed.  Or was it?  It seems as though there are quite a few unanswered questions, and Vincent, against the advice of his superiors, unofficially opens back up the case.

Now, here’s where the “twist” comes into play.  As this story opens, we don’t really know any of this, and the comings and goings of the renewed case are a mystery to us. It’s a mystery to us because it’s a mystery to Ruiz.  We first meet Ruiz drowning in the Thames river after being shot. What was he doing in the Thames? Why was he shot?  Ruiz doesn’t know, and neither do we.  So Ruiz has to somehow figure out the missing pieces to the puzzle of this case that has been completely wiped from his brain.  So along with Ruiz, we try to reconstruct exactly what happened to him and why.

All of this seemed a bit unnecessary to me. I guess it COULD make an interesting twist, but it never really felt that way. Instead, I felt either lost (there’s that word) or a bit cheated when it seemed that the protagonist would “suddenly regain” a portion of his memory when it seemed necessary and/or it was time to move the plot forward. It doesn’t really help when Ruiz becomes your standard rebellious detective who never “follows the rules” and of course, it’s only a matter of time when he’s fired and “off the force”. Whatever.

A big part of this novel involves the complex sewer system under the city of London that flows into the Thames River, and we get far too much detail about just how disgusting this place is that’s filled with rats, garbage, and human waste.  This is not a book that you really want to read if you have a queasy stomach.  If you don’t have one, you may just get one.

I really stopped caring about the story during the last 75 pages or so, and became a bit too disgusted with all the “sewage” descriptions. I was also a bit overwhelmed with too many characters.  Had I not been so anal about finishing a book once I start, I would have easily given up on this one.  It’s a good thing I didn’t read this for school because I would have failed the quiz about what actually happened at the end. My level of interest simply wasn’t there.

Note: This book is advertised as a “Joe O’Loughlin” book. Supposedly he shows up in several Robotham novels. He’s not really even a major character in this book, but he does serve a purpose and keeps the novel moving forward. I guess.