This author is so good!! I have only read 2 of his books and he already has all my heart! The writing is so different than anything I’ve read before, but still so beautiful and touching. So this book originally is about this little girl and her grandmother. But as you get to know all the characters and see how everyone is connected you learn to love it. It is so much more than just a story about a girl and her grandmother. It is about grief and loss, about being bullied and about family and making friends. This book has all the emotions. It made me cry and it made me laugh and it made me question life and society. I love this book very much and I could relate to so so many characters and things in this book. It has some beautiful quotes. It also has good representation of PTSD and grief in general. I truly love this book and every character in this story. Please please read it!

While there were portions of this book that I didn’t love, I loved the story and the concept overall. I loved the flawed characters who were human, but also endearing. Just when I would get to the point that I couldn’t stand a character, an insight into that person, or a different side to that person, would show itself, and suddenly I would love them. This book was also therapeutic for me. I was getting into the last quarter of the story when my mom called me to tell me my dad had passed away. Suddenly, the characters in the story weren’t just characters, but they were the people in my own life. The book became an allegory for my own story, and losing grandma was very much like losing my own dad. And when I read these words, they were very much the perfect description of what it’s like to see my mom endure the loss of her husband: “But Maud says she’s firstly a grandmother and secondly a mother-in-law and thirdly a mother, and this is what grandmothers and mothers-in-law and mothers do. They fight for the good....And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to be fixed again, Maud doesn’t know what weapon to use if one can’t use dreams.” Thank you, Mr Backman, for writing your story. This is the first time I can say that a book really helped me through a very tough time, but yours did exactly that. I very much appreciate it.

Nee, was schön! Wirklich nette Geschichte, erzählt aus der Sicht der (fast) 8jährigen Elsa - es geht um Vorurteile, Nachbarschaften, Harry Potter, den Jugoslawienkrieg, den Weihnachtstsunami - eine richtig runde Sache! Heikko Deutschman liest das ganze super - dieses Hörbuch hält definitiv Einzug in meine ewige Hall of Fame. Und ich glaube, dieses Buch gewinnt als Hörbuch, das würde ich gar nicht selber lesen wollen.

I might have had high expectations from this book after reading A man called Ove... and to be honest this book did start off with a great premise and beautiful characters. Nobody else can write grief and explain it better than Backman... However, I lost the essence of the book midway... I kind of felt it was dragged a bit and didn't really understand the point of the story. But maybe there wasn't one, maybe it was just the journey. This book in my head constantly made me think of Big Fish (The film by Tim Burton) but with its very own quirky characters and everything else! Nonetheless, it is a fun summer read. Backman is a beautiful storyteller and an author whose work one should definitely read. P.S. All the X-Men and Harry Potter reference made my heart just so happy.