Intelligent, precocious seven year-old Elsa doesn't quite fit in with the world and is bullied at school. She remains distant from her business-like mother who is separated from her obsessive-compulsive father, but Elsa has the support of her rather eccentric and anarchic grandmother. Elsa even shares a secret language with her grandmother and delights in her magic fairytale stories of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. When her grandmother dies however, Elsa finds that the world and the strange creatures that inhabit it might not be a figment of her imagination, but she has been strangely cut-off from flying off to it in her imagination since her grandmother died.
Backman's book is curiously pitched, not quite children's fiction, not quite adult. It's not without charm - the descriptions of the characters in Elsa's apartment block is well-observed and entertaining - but it feels like it is trying a little too hard, and veers close to sentimentality. Whether it manages to balance out its reality and fantasy worlds, I couldn't say. Unfinished.
Comments
Post a Comment