Maybe it was the fairy tale aspect?  This is my second book from the author- I read Anxious People in January and also struggled, but finished.

“Elsa is the sort of child who learned very early in life that it’s easier to make your way if you get to choose your own soundtrack.”

” ‘Only different people change the world,’ Granny used to say. ‘No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.’ ”

“The best stories are never completely realistic and never entirely made up.”

“Because every fairy tale has a dragon.”

“It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.”

“It’s a beautiful morning but a terrible day.”

“If you don’t like people, they can’t hurt you. Almost-eight-year-olds who are often described as ‘different’ learn that very quickly.”

“Because you hardly ever disappoint anybody if you just stay quiet. All almost-eight-year-olds know that.”

“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”

“You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits. She thinks that this will have to be the moral of this story.”

“‘We want to be loved,'” quotes Britt-Marie. “‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.'”

“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 ever be fixed again, Maud doesn’t know what weapon to use if one can’t use dreams.”

“Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.”

I’m glad you enjoyed it and I have heard it’s a good book but it’s not the right book for me right now. I hope I get back to it some day as I suspect it gets better, but I wasn’t enjoying the Land-of-waiting-for-better.

“Soup is soup whatever bowl it’s in,” reminds me of reading is reading whatever medium it’s served in (physical book, ebook, audiobook).

“Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.” So true!

And my favorite quote, “Special is the best kind of different to be.” There is often mention of Elsa being different and the victim of bullying. Although it was never specifically mentioned, as a retired teacher I thought Elsa was most likely on the spectrum. She was incredibly bright, said what came to her mind regardless of who she was speaking to or the situation, and had a strong fixation on superheroes. I’m wondering if other readers had this same impression and why do you think Backman never specified how Elsa was “different”.

I think the comparison between books is like you mentioned, a common theme that people are often not who they appear to be. I appreciate how he conveys that theme with a focus on different generations for each of his books. Ove (elderly), Bear Town (teens), Anxious People (younger adults), Britt-Marie (middle age adults), My Grandmother (child). Often when we read books where main characters are not of our generation we find it difficult to relate. Somehow Backman has this beautiful talent to help us make that connection with those of other generations.