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.