Elsa is seven, almost eight, and there is an awful lot going on in her life. Her wacky old Granny is her best friend and sometime protector and champion because Elsa is different and is routinely bullied at school. They have their own secret language and a rich and detailed folklore between them. Her parents have been long separated, and her mother is expecting another child with her new partner George. They refer to the sibling-to-be as “halfie” since it will be Elsa’s half-brother or sister (the parents want to be surprised). She visits her father and his new partner and her children every other weekend, but lives with her mother and George in an apartment building full of straight-out-of-casting crazies and misfits that is owned by her Granny.
Then her Granny dies and leaves a letter that sets her off on a quest, with a scavenger hunt to find and deliver a series of letters to people that Granny has “wronged”. In turn each seemingly crazy/mad/annoying character comes into focus and has their life story and reason for being the way they are explained, echoing the characters in the fairy tales her Granny told her over the years. There’s conflict, real danger and wacky misunderstandings but as in all fairy tales, the precocious child prevails in the end.
Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.
This book was fine and even had some real humor in it’s gentle moralizing. I tend to steer away from books where children are the protagonists and Elsa did get on my nerves a little. I read Backman’s A Man Called Ove earlier this year, and it was so similar in tone that by the end I had hit a bit of a wall with this sort of “heartwarming” tale, even though I identify with the message. Maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon.
