My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Frederik Backman

Growing up I never knew my grandparents. They all died rather young, so I never had the pleasure of listening to my grandparents' stories. I have often wondered about the stories they would have told:  crossing the ocean from Germany; the hardships of the depression and scrabbling to succeed as a small farmer in Kentucky.  They surely would have had adventures to tell too and I think I would have loved those stories best because all children appreciate quests and heroes and monsters and beasts.  In Frederik Backman's, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, we are once again introduced to wonderful characters but most importantly seven year old Elsa and her "paint ball firing" grandmother.  Elsa is a precocious, almost adult-like child who has no friends her own age and is bullied relentlessly at school.  But at home, with her granny, she travels to their magical land of the "Land of Almost Awake", speaking their own private language and enjoying and joining into adventures in each of the seven lands.  Sadly, Elsa's grandmother is sick and she dies leaving Elsa alone and heartbroken but also with a "quest" of her own.  She is instructed to deliver letters to the people she does not realize are connected to her grandmother and to herself.  Through her connections to the special people who live in her building, Elsa come to know her grandmother better; she learns to accept herself and those she thought were weird and different and unloveable; plus, she realizes her life is blessed by the "family" her grandmother created and introduced her to through her magical stories.  Granny's musings are life lessons for all of us.  Granny explained that "the real trick of life is to see that almost no one is enriely a sh#t, and almost no one is entirely not a sh#t".  and most importantly,"only different people change the world."  Words of wisdom to be sure.