It’s an acknowledgement by Granny that sometimes reality is best handled by escaping it, or at least by dealing with it in an allegorical sense. She does this in the most charming of ways by taking Elsa at every available opportunity to the six kingdoms of Land-of-Almost-Awake where differences are celebrated, magic and wonder and some darkness abound, and fairytales are a currency far more valuable than goods or money. Granny, naturally has had far longer to challenge the powers that be, becoming a doctor when women weren’t supposed to pursue it as a vocation, and flaunting just about social nicety going such as not shooting people with paintball guns and flinging excreta at the police, and so she is well-versed in schooling Elsa, a pupil by aptitude and necessity, in how to live life when you’re different. This, as you can well imagine, earns them little kudos, for the most part, and quite a bit of opprobrium. ‘No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.’ (P. ‘Only different people change the world,’ Granny used to say. “All fairy stories take their life from the fact of being different. Neither Granny nor Elsa are terribly good at playing by the rules, keeping quiet when social convention dictate they say nothing, or following the rest of the sheep, dismissed as “muppets” by the twosome, obediently into the paddock of life.
This charmingly insightful book, which dances merrily between humourous observation and deeply-affecting commentary on the way being different is lambasted rather than lauded most of the time, is all about people who simply don’t fit in.Ĭhief among them is the grandmother of the title, a woman who spent her life as a doctor in hotspots around the world, and her granddaughter Elsa, to whom she is devoted, who is a Harry Potter devotee and rather good at running, having to spend most of her time at school escaping bullies without number. It’s fertile ground on which to base a novel, and Fredrik Backman, a Swedish blogger who rose to fame on the back of his first novel A Man Called Ove, makes for the most of it with the appropriately quirkily named My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises. Square peg in a square hole? Yes, thank you. Humanity is, by and large, not very good at dealing with anyone or anything that steps outside the accepted norm.
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