My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

This one took me a while to get into, but it turned out to be a sweet story. It portrayed the messiness, pain, and sorrow of life through the eyes of a feisty 7 year old as she gets to know her eclectic neighbors. Three quotes from the book really hit home for me:

1) If you don't like people, they can't hurt you.

2) Death's greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.

3) If people you like have been shits on earlier occasions, you have to learn to carry on liking them. You'd quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who had some point have been shits.

This one is tough to review! I'm giving it 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 (because Jeffrey Bezos refuses to give us half stars). Some parts made me roll my eyes, some parts made me cry. I'm going to keep this short because I don't really have anything insightful. The 7-year-old main character was definitely precocious (as I think she was meant to be), but sometimes too much to the point of annoyance. And that just made me think maybe she wasn't wise, she was just a brat. But then it's also a lovely found family story, a story of grief and love and choices and anger and friendship and really getting to know people and realizing they all have a story instead of just judging them by what you see.

This was my first Backman and I'd like to read another. I can't quite tell if I enjoyed this one or not.

Unfortunately, this was a Backman that didn't hit for me. The book swings between grounded meaning and syrup-y sweetness on a dime. The grandmother foils Elsa nicely at the start, but, without her, Elsa becomes too precocious. I did listen to the audiobook so that may have made a difference, but still had difficulty coming to grips with the book's eccentricity.