A review by james1star
My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrik Backman

adventurous emotional funny hopeful reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Read this for my Bookish World Cup (video link: https://youtu.be/hV87o_hJqKI?si=lsQjjW_YXGSWreM-) but if not I’d definitely of DNFd this book.

I don’t think the story or character are anything particularly bad but the writing’s extremely dense and overwritten. We follow soon-to-be-eight year old Elsa via a third person perspective and her relationship with her wacky granny. Their bond is so strong and clearly important for Elsa given an up-and-down family life and bullying in school, he grandmother tells her stories which were nice to start. Not long into the book, we find out granny has cancer and sadly dies but not before instrumenting an adventure for Elsa embark on. Via letters to other characters in the real world, she gets to understand the past lives of her granny and I would say the piecing together of the story was certainly the best part of this book. It was a rewarding reading experience to some extent but… 

…It is just so dense that on the whole I was left very unfulfilled and slightly irritated after finishing this. So much of the book is filled with repetition after repetition of the same messages, names, and in many ways mini plot twists/turns that after a while you do see coming. Backman goes on far too many tangents including mountains of unnecessary detail and storytelling that was okay to start but became extremely monotonous as the book went on. I had a similar issue in reading ‘A Man Called Ove’ but at least in that we were following characters that I cared for (take a moment of appreciation for Sonja) and it wasn’t that bad. But here… ugh I dunno I didn’t find a lot of what occurred all that realistic and I feel the formatting took me out of the story. This could’ve been helped had Backman chose first person POV from Elsa but then again I don’t think he truly grappled with a child’s understanding all that well. 

Overall, this was fine. I liked how things fitted into place but was certainly overwritten. Not the best from Backman. 

Note: no chocolate for dogs! Or much else they give them tbh. 
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