Fredrik Backman

I bought “My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry” because the title intrigued me and anyway, who could resist the little girl and the scarf-wearing dog on the cover?

At the start of the novel Elsa is seven and her grandmother, Elsa’s personal super-hero, is seventy-seven. The two of them are in league with one another against a world too stupid to see that being different is a gift.

In other hands, this might have degenerated into a Hallmark movie, good enough to get you show more through a rainy afternoon, but soon gone from your memory. In Fredrik Backman’s hands it became something truly remarkable: a new fairy tale that delivers old truths so that they taste as fresh as newly baked biscuits.

“My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry” is so good, it’s hard to know where to start when explaining just how good it is.

Should I start with the unique voice the story is told in? The beautiful simplicity of the language? The deft interweaving of the myth and fairy tale and reality?

Or perhaps I should speak about the bravery of an almost eight-year old girl in confronting grief and loss, knowing that they can’t be defeated but must not be surrendered to?

Or the way the book unearths adult truths through the eyes of a child who is smart enough to understand the importance of reading “quality literature” like “Harry Potter” and the “X-Men” to gain an understanding not only of how the world works but how it should work?

Maybe I should comment on the fact that I never once felt as if I was reading a translation (except perhaps from the writer’s imagination to mine) or that the narration was so perfect it made the words spark and flash in my mind?

In fact, none of these are the right place to start. They walk around the book rather than live in it.

I’m sure that the right place to start is how this book made me feel.

It made me want to be better than I am. It gave me hope that I can be better than I am. It gave me permission to forgive myself when I fail to be better. It reminded me that imagination is the birth-place of hope and love and bravery. Most of all, it made me want to defend the castle and take care of those I love (you’ll know what this means when you read the book).

This is one of those wonderful, perfectly formed, books that goes beyond being a beautifully crafted piece of writing to become something that has a soul of its own.

For such books there is nothing to be done except say, “Please read this”.

To tempt you to do that, here are some of my favourite quotes

“The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people left behind want to stop living.”

“When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]”

“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

“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.”

“Granny was the sort of person you brought with you when you went to war, and that was what Elsa loved about her.”

“People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. ‘They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.’ As if that was how oppression works.” show less

5 / 5

(TW because nobody warned me, and i wish they had! r*pe and sexual ass*ult, family trauma, violence, homophobia… this book is extremely triggering lmao)

what i am right now is speechless. wHAT a triumph dude. i don’t give a singular fuck about hockey. but this book made me care - this book took hockey and shoved it right into my heart.

this is not a sports book. aT ALL. this is a book about a small community that is rocked by trauma - and there’s SO much that goes into the show more incident. there is such a rich, wide swath of characters in BEARTOWN. everyone from the town makes an appearance, and as a reader you feel so connected to all of them. it’s a testament to BACKMAN’s incredible talent that i cared about every. single. character. and that NEVERR happens to me.

i can’t talk about this next part without spoiling it, so…

***major spoilers ahead***

the way r*pe and ass*ult are handled in this book amazed me. obviously, there was great intentional care taken here, with real survivors’ input. it was extremely difficult to read, extremely painful to witness as a reader, but wow what an incredible story. and such an important one??? telling a tale of hostile, toxic masculinity in sports is a super daunting task. but BACKMAN did such a beautiful job. i ached for maya, i ached for the town! so much pressure riding on such young people. the environment that allowed r*pe to happen within its ranks also fostered a sense of community - toughness, refusal to quit, a “winning” attitude. but also, major disrespect for women. major dehumanization of the other. GODDDD this book was so good.

the choice that maya makes at the end is so satisfying. benji’s sisters? incredible. ana? maya’s MOM? ramona???? the way that women are the fucking BACKBONE of beartown made this all the more powerful. there is so much gentle attention paid to the weight that women carry. this book is also such a true portrait of human experience. every moment was believable. every escalation felt earned.

i loved and appreciated how important loyalty is in BEARTOWN - and then, when loyalty is questioned, how do you know what’s right? how does one stand up for the truth when it would be so much easier to let the lie win? UGH!! amat was my favorite character, my favorite progression, my favorite climax of the book. what a beautiful way to depict the moral battle that people go through when their foundation is shaken.

***spoilers ended***

i will be thinking about BEARTOWN for the next 5-8 months. maybe i will be thinking about this book for the rest of my life? i had no idea how much i would come to care about the people of beartown.

my compliments to the chef, 1000 times over. i could use this word and it still wouldn’t encapsulate the truth: masterpiece. absolute feat of literary STRENGTH. so many characters, so many chapters, and yet it is flawlessly woven into a beautiful tapestry. incredible story. just… incredible. this is my favorite read of 2023. this may be my favorite read since CLOUD CUCKOO LAND? this is the kind of book that i’m going to force people to read, because it’s illuminating. it’s heart wrenching. it’s loving, and thoughtful, and so beautiful.

it’s rare that i walk away from a book thinking, “thank god someone wrote that. thank god that exists.” but here we are. read this fucking book, people. 5/5, and don’t you forget it. show less

The Winners, Fredrick Backman
I have always loved reading books by this author because of his final message which is always filled with hope, in spite of the tricks life often plays on us. This one, however, gave me doubts about whether or not that would happen, since it brought me to such height and depths of emotion, that reading it, I found I thought I might lose hope. How could such needless tragedy take place again and again? This book felt almost too close to reality, at times. For show more isn’t that the source of the stress we experience daily, the constant occurrence of unexplained, unnecessary, unwanted fury and violence for which we seem always unprepared and surprised? Backman does pull hope from the jaws of despair, finally, and that is what saved the book for me.
It took me a long time to read this novel because I kept anticipating that something bad was going to happen and after reading the first two books, these characters had become family. I did not want to feel the pain of their sorrows with such immediacy, and with such force as Backman packs very strong feelings into each sentence and description. The scenes seemed so real and full of the emotions the characters were feeling, that I identified with each of their traumas and joys. Each of their problems became my own to solve. In this book, I did not get an equal amount of the hopefulness, I felt in the others, at first. This one played out more intensity, until the end.
So many of the characters were motivated by pure vengeance and the quest for power, without thinking through the reasons or consequences of their actions beforehand. This resulted in so much unnecessary destruction, threats, wasted lives, and negative behavior. In the other books, I always felt that there was an equal or better force fighting the forces of evil in his previous books, but in this book, the forces of evil won so often, that the brutality was palpable, building the tension within me to almost unbearable levels. Was this a representation of our real world? Are we really so thoughtless when it comes to how we treat each other? Are we really so self-interested that we will sacrifice each other to save our own face or something material, something far more meaningless than a life? I was left wondering if Tails act of sacrifice, at the end, was enough, was appropriate, was even moral? Did it mean he had learned to respect the rules and the people above his own needs, but what about the others? Did it mean he was still motivated by the need to save the town, regardless of the cost, regardless of the means to the end or to save a good person and repent for his own misdeeds? Oh yes, Backman has truly captured Sir Walter Scott’s tangled web that we weave, when first we practice to deceive, in this series of books.
The pettiness, immaturity, lying and cheating, adults acting like children, motivated by vengeance, the arrogance and the bullying, the thugs vs the good guys in conflict constantly, the search for someone to hurt or blame, even in the cause of justice seemed cruel, not fair, and all of these emotions and feelings that are deep within each of us is captured by this author. He seems to understand every minute emotional moment perfectly. The book is hypnotic, so you will be compelled to keep reading. Every single word has power. Every human condition will appear at some time and be analyzed for what it really is and what it really means to us. Race, gender, the media, sports, the environment, sex, poverty, fear, shame, guilt, wealth, power, hope, hopelessness, crime, all subjects are fair game as the motivations for actions are deconstructed. Nothing and no one is portrayed as perfect. In the recurrent themes and the bang, bang, bang of the hockey puck, their flaws are exposed, but still, even the worst of the characters is redeemable, as each has some good within them, no matter how bad they seem. I suppose that is the hopefulness at the end of the book, even though it felt overshadowed by so much pain, from natural and unnatural causes.
Hed and Beartown will continue to feud, as real cities continue to have problems, but they will, like all cities and people, repair their damage and move on, as life, too, must go on. This book is not really about hockey, it is about people, real life, friendship, love, how we live, how we die, who we are and who we are not, how we cope and how we don’t, how we respond and how we repent. The yin and the yang are on every page as Backman gives his story life, and as he gives it breath. Each individual character becomes less important than the whole, and it is the survival of the whole that we fight for, in the end. In that purpose is our hope. show less

This quote towards the end of the book - "Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control." - perfectly sums it up. Though, really, it's at the core of all of Backman's works. By telling the backstory and hinting at motivations for every character, he's pushing empathy on the readers. The text doesn't absolve actions, but it forces us to understand them. Humans are messy and we get show more that from these books. At the same time, Backman throws in lines about the future, heightening hope that everyone peft behind will turn out alright. It's catharsis you can carry. Read. Release. Repeat. show less