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Book Review: My Grandmother Told Me To Tell You She’s Sorry

My Grandmother Told Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman

Atria Books, 2016

ISBN-13: 9781501160486

Available: Hardcover/Kindle edition/Audio Download/Compact Disc

 

Elsa is seven, “going on eight”. Her world looks bleak: she is too mature for her age. and is bullied and friendless at school.  Elsa’s parents are divorced.  She lives with her mother, who is tied up in her work and has little time for Elsa.  Fortunately, she has a tight bond with her grandmother.  Granny is seventy-seven, a retired doctor with a mysterious past.  For many years, she travelled the world helping others caught up in disasters, but spent little time at home raising Elsa’s mother.

Every evening at bedtime, Granny tells Elsa tales about a fantastic world called the “Land-of-Almost-Awake.”  That world has kingdoms with battling armies, princesses, heroes and beasts.  Granny and Elsa have a secret language.  One kingdom is named “Miamas” because Elsa called pajamas, “mjamas”, when she was younger.

As the story progresses, the separation between the fantasy world and the real world becomes obscured.  Elsa, her mother, and Granny live in separate flats in an old apartment building.  Tenants in the other flats are cantankerous and quirky.  Some might have superpowers and unknown connections to Granny’s past.  Most are human, but two tenants, who are never seen, might not be.  They are a hooded giant known as  “Monster”, and the “Wurse”, a huge, hairy canine.

Then Granny dies, leaving Elsa the task of delivering letters of apology to some of the tenants, as well as other people she has known.  Can Elsa evade malevolent creatures from the fantasy world she created with Granny as she tries to carry out Granny’s wishes?  Will she learn who the tenants really are. and what Granny really did in her other life?

My Grandmother Told Me To Tell You She’s Sorry perceptively and sympathetically portrays an exceptional, young girl’s struggle to fit into a world in which she is too mature for her peers, yet excluded from the secrets of adults.  When her Granny dies, Elsa loses her sanctuary and must try to reconcile her fantasy world with reality.  The characters are well drawn, and the plot moves along with an appropriate pace.  Fredrik Backman has written two other novels, A Man Called Ove and Britt Marie Was Here.  These novels also describe the dilemmas and problems misfits encounter in the world of ordinary people. Highly recommended for older children, teens, and adults.

Reviewed by: Robert D. Yee

Posted on October 6, 2017 by , Reply

Book List: Ordinary Heroes To Share With Your Kids

mister rogers helpers quote

It’s a scary world out there even if you don’t have your nose stuck in a book (sometimes even with horror, as the fiction can actually be more comforting than the reality) For sure, though, if you are anywhere around kids, you’ll know that they see and hear enough to get their anxiety ratcheted way up by what’s going on in the world today.

My daughter is pretty into the chapter book stage of childhood reading at this point but she picked out a book this week that actually is all pictures and no words, which is a pretty powerful illustration (that pun was not intended) of the impact ordinary people can make on the world. and it made me think of a couple of others that might be good to share with younger kids who are getting seriously worried. There is a lot going on that I haven’t figured out how to address with my kids– fear of nuclear war, hurricanes, wildfires– gosh, there’s so much to be afraid of. But also, there are helpers. Ordinary people. Artists, librarians, letter-writers, musicians, people walking down the street, even children, who have made a difference, and continue to do so.

 

Letters to a Prisoner by Jacque Goldstyn

This is the wordless picture book my daughter picked out. It’s very simple– line drawings that you could almost imagine a child drawing, with watercolor washes . In it, a father is separated from his child when a peaceful protest turns violent. He is jailed, isolated from the world. All kinds of people, from all over the world (and including one astronaut) write letters to him and on his behalf, until he flies away on their wings, home again.  The book was inspired by Amnesty International’s Write for Rights Campaign.
 

Painting for Peace in Ferguson by Carol Swartout Klein

In 2014, after a white police officer shot and killed an African-American man, Michael Brown, unrest and protests in Ferguson, Missouri resulted in violence and property damage. In an effort to begin healing the community, local artist Carol Swartout Klein brought artists and community members of all ages and races together to paint over the boarded-up storefronts with brilliant murals expressing hope and unity. Painting for Peace in Ferguson presents color photo collages of the creative people who participated and the art they created, over simple backgrounds created by Klein. Proceeds benefit art, youth and small business recovery programs in North St. Louis County.
 

Alia’s Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq by Mark Alan Stamaty

In 2003, Alia Muhammed Baker  was the chief librarian for the Central Library in Basra, Iraq. When the Iraqi military occupied the library, she knew it was only a matter of time before the library would be bombed and the books destroyed. Determined to save the books and the collective memory of the Iraqi people, she started smuggling books out of the library under her jacket, eventually filling her entire house with stacks of books. As the bombing escalated, she recruited friends to sneak books over a wall into the restaurant on the other side. With their help, Alia was able to save 30,000 of the library’s 40,000 books before the library was destroyed.  There’s a gorgeously illustrated picture book version of this story, The Librarian of Basra, but I like this graphic novel version better.
 

Mole Music by David McPhail

I love this book so much. Mole lives by himself, underground. Digging isn’t enough for him, so he decides to take up the violin. At first he’s terrible, but as he improves, the plants above his hole start to thrive. A tree takes root and grows, unnoticed, right through his ceiling, amplifying the beautiful music as the world above ground changes. Unaware as he is of the great conflict about to occur in the valley above him, it is Mole’s music that stops the armies in their tracks. One small person can have a very big effect.
 

Yo! Yes? by Chris Raschka

I get all children’s-librarian-geeky over this book. It doesn’t really have the message of  “we all can change the world for the better” or even “one person can change the world for the better.”Yo! Yes? gets down to the nitty-gritty: one person reaching out to another makes both of them richer. The text of the book is very simple– one or two words on each page. The words come from a conversation the author heard between two boys while walking down the street. The book is designed so that there is one boy on each page of the double-page spread, and you can see the two halves of the conversation going back and forth. The words are big on the page, so it’s a great shared-reading book, and you get to shout a lot, which is always fun. Our story here is that we have two boys, each on his own, and one reaches out to the other to make friends. This is not a quiet, tentative thing. Once these kids connect, they are loud and joyful. The world is going to hear them coming! But none of that happens without one ordinary kid calling out to the other, and getting a response.

And now back to our regular programming.

Posted on September 13, 2017 by , Reply

Musings: There’s A Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott

There’s A Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott

Doubleday, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-0385540438

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

I love Maurice Sendak. One of my favorite books to read aloud to children, especially when reading in a storyhour, is Where The Wild Things Are. I mean, there is nothing like getting a crowd of kindergarteners to roar their terrible roars without holding back.

But there is also something that makes many people (mostly adults, I think) uneasy about his work. There are uncomfortable emotions, uncontrollable imaginations, and so much hunger in his illustrations. These are all most evident in the three books he referred to as his “trilogy”: Where the Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There. Of these three books, Outside Over There is probably the least well known, and also the one that came from the deepest places in Sendak’s mind and heart, as well as having broad influences from his past and present circumstances and experiences. In There’s A Mystery There, Jonathan Cott delves as far down as he can into Sendak’s psyche and casts a wide net to capture the manifold ways it expresses itself, specifically through an examination of Outside Over There. 

In a serendipitous set of circumstances, Cott met and interviewed Sendak in 1976, just as he was starting Outside Over There, and again in 1981, after receiving an advance copy of the book directly from the author, so he witnessed both the beginnings and the winding down of the process of creation for what Sendak described as “the last excavation of my soul.”

There’s A Mystery There is Cott’s attempt to go further into Sendak’s soul by exploring his past– family, childhood, and career; his obsessions and associations– the Lindbergh kidnapping, Mozart, the artists who inspired him; his many books, particularly Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There; and Sendak’s own thoughts and comments as expressed to Cott through interviews. It goes further by including discussions of Outside Over There, specifically, with psychoanalyst Dr. Richard Gottlieb, Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck, art historian Jane Doonan, and writer, co-creator, and Sendak biographer Tony Kushner, These are all fascinating discussions, exploring the book from a variety of different angles, and from my point of view as someone who reads a lot of children’s books, reads a lot about children’s books, and loves the art of Maurice Sendak, this was very readable and eye-opening. A brief biographical sketch does not offer the fascinating window that the biographical information and commentary on Sendak’s past found in the first half of this book, so for anyone wanting to go below surface details this is a great resource. The art historian’s close examination of the book’s illustrations is very much worthwhile for someone wanting to get into the details of the art in the book.  The other discussions are interesting if you want to delve deeper into Sendak’s psyche, but an average reader may not necessarily need that level of detail.

From reading this book, I discovered new connections between Sendak and his work, and made observations that I hadn’t made previously. What I didn’t find was a definitive answer to what the book is about, what it really means, or why, despite my fascination with the book, the ending is so frustrating for me.  Rather than providing straightforward information, Cott’s writing is more of a spiral in and out, twisting around the center of what Outside Over There, giving the reader clues without closing the window to manifold worlds.

Outside Over There inspired the movie Labyrinth, and if you are looking for a satisfying ending, you probably ought to check it out. Sendak’s version continues to keep me wondering, and Cott’s writing, while it resolves some things, leaves the book still a mystery.

Recommended for students and lovers of children’s literature, picture book illustration, literary criticism, and Maurice Sendak: and for libraries serving educators and librarians.

Note: I’ve previously written about Outside Over There. If you’d like to see what I said, click here.

 

 

Posted on August 28, 2017 by , Reply
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