Reseña: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

"My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry"

(Titulo Original: Min mormor hälsar och säger förlåt)

Autor: Fedrick Backman

Traducido por:  Henning Koch

Año Primera Publicación: 2013

N° Páginas: 384 pgs.

 Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy, standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-men-who-want-to-talk-about-Jesus-crazy. She is also Elsa's best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother's stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.

When Elsa's grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa's greatest adventure begins. Her grandmother's letters lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and totally ordinary old crones, but also to the truth about fairytales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other.

My ranking: 3 STARS.

 **ARC kindly provided by Atria Books, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.**

-------------------------------------------------------
Published June 25th 2015
Hardcover, 448 pages

ISBN: 9781501115066
-------------------------------------------------------

Elsa is a very lonesome girl. Her only friend is her grandmother, and a very unconventional one (she is that weird lady of the neighborhood). Her mother is not a bad mother, as many working mom in the world just is not there all the time. But that doesn't mather because Elsa has her grandmother.

“I didn’t want you to remember this day because of the scarf. So I thought instead you could remember it as the day your Granny broke into a zoo—”
“And escaped from a hospital,” Elsa says with a grin.
“And escaped from a hospital,” says Granny with a grin.
“And threw turds at the police.”
“Actually, it was soil! Or mainly soil, anyway.”
“Changing memories is a good superpower, I suppose.”
Granny shrugs.
“If you can’t get rid of the bad, you have to top it up with more goody stuff.”

Alas, grandmothers don't last forever.

This is discovery journey about family, relationships, mothers and daughter, grandmothers and granddaughters, friendship and ... regrets.

*

About Elsa, she is a 7 year-old going to 14. Precocious child, nerd, she escapes to an imaginary world with Granny. And then she keeps her mind in the quest, the clues, in a inner-building world that implies her building and her neighbours (think in a some kind of realist Coraline).

Elsa doesn’t know if this means that Granny took all her stories from the real world and placed them in Miamas, or if the stories from Miamas became so real that the creatures came across to the real world. But the Land-of-Almost-Awake and her house are obviously merging.
Elsa remembers how Granny said that “the best stories are never completely realistic and never entirely made-up.” That was what Granny meant when she called certain things “reality-challenged.” To Granny, there was nothing that was entirely one thing or another. Stories were completely for real and at the same time not.

Hay muchos comentarios acerca de Harry Potter en este libro, ya que es el libro favorito de Elsa, y a veces parece que para ella fuera el único que existe en el mundo. 

The Good Stuff: The secundary characters. You feel the drama. The threads between them.

The no-so-good: Elsa's egotism. I'm sorry but I could never get to identify me with this girl, I accept that children could be like that, but she is not a likable character. So blunt and many times insensitive 7 y.o. girl? Hmm, sorry, no.

I was bothered by the reference of the boy with Down Syndrome always as 'the Down boy' and 'the Down boy's mother'.

-

Others books named here: -Harry Potter.

                                           -The Lionheart Brothers.

http://books.simonandschuster.com/My-Grandmother-Asked-Me-to-Tell-You-Shes-Sorry/Fredrik-Backman/9781501115066