Give the letter to him who's waiting. He won't want to accept it, but tell him it's from me. Tell him your granny sends her regards and says she's sorry.My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises is a little hard to get into: Told from the perspective of Ulricha (a seven-almost-eight-year-old girl with a complicated homelife and no friends), we meet her granny (the type of old woman who would break into the zoo's monkey enclosure in the middle of the night and fling poop at the cops when they show up) and soon learn that Granny has made up a complex world of fairy tales for her granddaughter (complete with a secret language), and as the pair discuss real life and the Seven Kingdoms of the Land-of-Almost-Awake interchangeably, it takes some time to make everything clear in the reader's head. And then, by page thirty, we realise that Granny is about to die, and before she passes, she assigns Ulricha – as a Knight of Miamas – a quest, a treasure hunt; to visit Our Friend and deliver a letter to The Monster. As Ulricha performs her quest and gathers allies, we realise that the fairy tales Granny has been telling her granddaughter every night of her life – of sea-angels, princesses and the Chosen One – were actually thinly veiled references to real people with tragic histories, and much mutual healing ensues. I found this book to be equally charming and frustrating, but there was ultimately enough good in it to tip the balance into a favourable experience.
Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild's ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact. A grandmother is both a sword and a shield.Ulricha is a typically precocious child protagonist – she uses big words that she learns from “quality literature” like X-Men and Spider-Man comics – and at school, she's considered different. So different that she daily gets notes in her locker telling her she's ugly and that the other kids want to kill her, and indeed, most days she is chased and beaten. When we learn that this is why her granny broke into the zoo (as both a distraction and an explanation for Ulricha's ripped scarf), I really liked this old woman and admired what lengths she would go to for a sad and bullied little girl. As the grandmother's history is revealed through the people that Ulricha meets, we realise that there's much more to Granny than the crazy old woman we see shooting paintballs at her neighbours from her balcony, wearing nothing but an untied bathrobe. And although I understand that the narrative needed for Granny to die in order to trigger the quest, I much preferred the brief opening where she is alive to the three hundred pages that follow. Much of the humour of this book is of a winky ironic sort, as in:
Elsa buys two ice creams. The wurse eats all of its own and half of hers. Which, if one knows how much wurses like ice cream, shows how immensely considerate it was being. It spills some of it in the back seat, but Alf only shouts at it for ten minutes. Which, if one knows how much Alf dislikes wurses spilling ice cream in the back seat of Taxi, shows how immensely considerate he was being.But when Granny was alive, we saw humour like this:
As Granny likes to put it, 'In the end the problem disappears, said the old lady who crapped in the sink'.The story becomes very serious as Ulricha performs her quest (discussing PTSD, and grief, and abuse, and genocide) and I often didn't believe that she was as young as she's meant to be (just saying that she's constantly researching complex ideas on Wikipedia doesn't mean she'd understand them). And the writing can get platitudinous, with repetitions of phrases like The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people you left behind want to stop living and If a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal. Both those phrases are written in some form more than once, and something like four times this book repeats, “There's no coincidence in fairy tales”: so the reader knows that everything in the Land-of-Almost-Awake will have a parallel in real life, and you're watching for it and there aren't a lot of surprises.
That's the frustrating bits, but in the end, I was charmed by Ulricha and Granny and breezed through the book in an afternoon. I liked it enough to want to seek out Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove. I'd give My Grandmother Sends 3.5 stars based on my overall enjoyment, but I'm removing that half star due my annoyance over the naming of Halfie at the end. /grump
I was just meeting a new coworker last week, and when she asked what I was then currently reading, I started to tell her about The Trouble With Goats and Sheep. I hadn't begun yet to find that book too annoying, so she said, "Oh, if you're liking that, you'll love My Grandmother Sends...", and it was primarily out of politeness that I picked it up. And here's the thing: they're pretty much the same book, with precocious child narrators who uncover very adult-themed secrets. They even have the same central theme (about not judging people by appearances and the difficulty of separating the good people from the bad). The author of Goats and Sheep says her moral is:
Through the eyes of Grace, our ten year-old narrator, we discover that if we scratch the surface of most sheep, we might very well find ourselves with a goat. And the biggest problem of all, is trying to work out the difference.
And in My Grandmother Sends we find:
Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the ‘not-a-shit’ side as one can.
So, one of the reasons why I did prefer this book to that one is the comparative success of pulling off that theme, without bonking me over the head with it.
As I kind of alluded to in the review of Goats and Sheep, there was such a deliberateness to the plot that it was almost although it was written on onionskin paper and I could see the plot-graph showing through behind it. This culminated in a false-climax scene -- in which Tilly is hospitalised and Grace has an emotional visit with her only friend -- and in My Grandmother Sends, at the exact same point in the narrative, Ulrich's pet "wurse" is attacked and we see an emotional visit to the veterinarian hospital as the little girl visits her only friend. If there is such a "How to Plot-Graph a Novel " out there, both of these authors were consulting it, with Backman utilising it more discreetly.
Both narrators also speak in platitudes, but where Grace seemed to come to these mature conclusions on her own, Ulricha appears to be quoting the lessons she learned from Granny. Again, the advantage goes to Backman. Overall, if one was looking for a book of this sort, I'd recommend My Grandmother Sends over Goats and Sheep.
And a last comment: There was a question on goodreads that I answered this morning that I want to share. Naomi asked: There are two different English titles for this book. Are they different translations? Is there anything else different about them that I should know about before buying a copy?
Because there is the alternate title My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and because that was something I had been curious about as well, I replied: Both are translated by Henning Koch so I assume they're the same. What's ironic: the main character (a seven, nearly eight, year old girl) is obsessed with Harry Potter, and as is widely known, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was renamed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the American market, and I think the two different titles for this book reflect the same kind of thinking at the publishing houses (which I think is an insulting dumbing down, as though Americans wouldn't pick up the version with the more complicated title, which, by the way, is what we have here in Canada next door).
Wasn't that an insulting dumbing down with Harry Potter? I understand that the American version of this book would also have Americanised spellings (and therefore a "z" in the version with "Apologises" in the title), but surely they didn't alter the title just to avoid that one word?