Not every seven-year-old has a grandmother for a best friend but clever and curious Elsa does. And her grandmother isn’t like yours or mine. She breaks into zoos in the mid­dle of the night, gets chased by the police, throws turds at them and, to Elsa’s delight and dismay, has horrible spelling. She is also Elsa’s key to the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the kingdom of Miamas where she gets to be a knight and ride cloud animals.

 

This is where Elsa goes to escape reality—being bullied in her class for using long words or the fact that her mom is pregnant with her half sib­ling, whom she calls Halfie, and who will, she believes, make her mom love her less.

 

Granny might be crazy for some but for Elsa she is a super-hero. Then Elsa overhears that Granny has can­cer and the world that Granny has so carefully constructed for Elsa falls apart and Elsa struggles to forgive her. And, to make things worse, Granny dies. But before that she sends Elsa on a mission whereby she has to deliver some letters to people. What follows is a merging of reality and the Land-of-Almost-Awake.

 

 Backman is a skilled storyteller and his greatest strength is his ability to seamlessly merge humor and seriousness

 

Every story that her grandmother has ever told her (that happened in Miamas or other fairytale land) seems to be unfurling right before her eyes, and every character she met or hid from at the Land-of-Al­most-Awake has a real life coun­terpart. It’s through discovering these characters that Elsa ulti­mately forgives her grandmother for dying.

 

Heartbreaking yet hilarious, ‘My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises’ will charm you and make you see the world from an almost-eight-year-olds’ perspective, which really isn’t a bad thing if you think about it.

 

Backman is a skilled storytell­er and his greatest strength is his ability to seamlessly merge humor and seriousness in his writing. The only downside for those of us who have read Backman’s other work, namely ‘Britt-Marie Was Here’, is that you get to meet Britt-Marie in My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises as Elsa’s nosy and annoying neighbor.

 

For those who have already taken to her eccentric ways in Britt-Marie Was Here, that’s a little disheart­ening. However, Elsa teaches you a thing or two about loss, grief, anger, and ultimately forgiveness that makes My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises a sto­ry you are not likely to forget any time soon.

 

Book: MY GRANDMOTHER SENDS HER REGARDS AND APOLOGISES

Author: Fredrik Backman

Genre: Fiction

Translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch

Publisher: Sceptre

Pages: 353, Paperback