Book Review : 'My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry' by Fredrik Backman

My Rating

Book Name : My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
Author : Fredrik Backman
Genre : Fiction

Blurb : Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy, standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-men-who-want-to-talk-about-Jesus-crazy. She is also Elsa's best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother's stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.
When Elsa's grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa's greatest adventure begins. Her grandmother's letters lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and totally ordinary old crones, but also to the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other.

Book from my eyes : I picked this book due to my fondness towards PS I love you as this book is based on the concept of letters by Elsa's late grandmother to be delivered to different people whom she wants to say sorry and Goodreads rating of 4. But not to be mentioned, this was the utterly disappointing novel. I know I shouldn't compare one book to other but I am saying this considering this novel as a unique novel. First of all, I couldn't understand the concept of this novel up to first 110 pages and after that, this book still made some sense. But by then this book lost the charm to impress me.

Thumbs Up:

• The concept of merging fairy tell with real life is a good and unique one.

Thumbs Down :

• I couldn't understand the concept of the novel up to first 110 pages. Till then, it was very boring, because of weird terms used to describe the different kingdom, different animals. When it started making some sense, it seemed to be very dragging and boring.
• As the story is mainly narrated from Elsa's point of view, there are many things which really didn't make any sense.
• Almost everything, be it an incident, be it feeling, be it some words has been repeated again and again and again which is utterly boring. The book might have content of hardly 100 pages but because of these repetitions, it became one of 370 pages.
• Characterization is really poor. Elsa, a girl of just 8 years of age is smarter than anyone and everyone. The same person can be a doctor, a father at a church, an attorney and many more thing which is really unrealistic.
• Some people do the same thing all the time, like someone making eggs or running, someone offering cookies, someone drinking coffee is too much to handle. 

Verdict : I am disappointed with this book and will not promote anyone reading this.