K-SCORE: 91
Author: Fredrik Backman
Most of what should be said about Backman’s novel My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry should be said by Backman himself. It is a novel both challenging and sweetly simple, with characters so basic and yet so lovable at the same time that they resist ordinary description, for adults starring children. Backman does what many authors hope to be able to do: break your heart and make you feel like perhaps it will all be okay anyway. I would have finished sooner, but I kept having to rub my eyes so that I could once again see the words on the page not but through a salty haze.
“It’s worth every bit of your time, if you can stomach how tremendously sad it is.”
Elsa, the almost-eight-year-old narrator is a child so beautifully perceptive, curious, and clever that she not only does allows the book to have an almost-eight-year-old narrator, but she actually enhances it. I fell in love with her immediately. Her story is one of coping with the loss of her grandmother while simultaneously exploring the myriad ways her grandmother was connected with the lives of her apartment mates and family. Her grandmother hid letters of apology as breadcrumbs for Elsa to find, taking her through real world adventures, unfolding real mysteries, through the lens of a fairy tale land that her grandmother had spent all of Elsa’s life describing. Every letter, every subplot that Elsa uncovers, convinces you how powerful a person this grandmother was even though the first couple chapters show her as a kook. By the end, you’re convinced that she had tremendous love for everyone, sometimes they’re guide, sometimes they’re savior, sometimes they’re friend, always their adversary. Yet above everything else, she cared for Elsa, and as Elsa learns about her grandmother’s life, you grow to understand why. Elsa has to learn things no almost-eight-year-old should have to learn, has experience things no almost-eight-year-old should have to experience, but the world is unfair and Elsa is a brave knight of Miamas and up to the challenge. It’s worth every bit of your time, if you can stomach how tremendously sad it is.
“He spins their lives together in a delicate web and uses Elsa as the spider who gets to go around exploring and feasting on their stories.”
Backman makes every character flawed and makes every person redeemable at the same time. He spins their lives together in a delicate web and uses Elsa as the spider who gets to go around exploring and feasting on their stories. She’s the only one with the personality strong enough, brave enough, to hold the whole thing together once her grandmother is gone. The only issue I took with the story, really, is that because the web is so tightly woven, it makes the world itself feel small, as if there is no one living now, in the past, or the future that exists beyond the house with all the apartments. Such a tiny dynamic of a few characters makes the plotting seem convoluted at times, but the infraction is forgivable because everything is so deftly done.
It’s the end that I loved and hated the most because I love and hate the ends of things and loved and hated this thing and therefore it’s end. Granny has been saying she’s sorry for all the little things she did and all the big things she didn’t do and trying to get Elsa to understand her better even though she’s gone, but it’s clear from the start that she loved Elsa more than anyone else and Elsa loved her more than anyone else. So when Elsa is last to receive a letter of apology, there’s only one thing left to apologize for, and it’s what Elsa has been mad at her grandmother about the entire novel. No one should have to apologize for dyeing but maybe it’s the bravest among us that do. It will always be hardest for those left behind.