And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer: a review ❤

Title: And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

Author: Fredrik Backman

Publisher: Atria Books Simon & Schuster

Pages: 97

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Who will like it? A child or an old man. Someone at the beginning of life, or in the middle, or approaching the end. Writing connects us somehow.

This story probably made me cry as much as when I read The Giving Tree when I was nine. It describes dementia in a way anyone can understand, and I think if I gave this book to my nine-year-old self, I would love it as much as I do now, and learn about what Alzheimer’s feels like beyond “memory loss”. This book doesn’t explain it through elaborating on scientific pathways, but instead gently describes a state of mind — slowly losing one’s mind before the body gives away, and feeling frustrated, scared, impatient, and upset with the people whom we love the most. There is this feeling of inextinguishable fear as our own precious memories start to fail us.

Noah and Grandpa sit together on a bench next to a square inside Grandpa’s brain, and rest for a while, looking at his memories stored in his mind as the square gets smaller and smaller, and fragments of thoughts are disappearing gradually. Grandpa tries so hard to remember, trying so hard that the square is shaking, shaking. He’s scared of forgetting the people he loves the most.

Backman shows that our hearts are connected in a special space, where we love each other and understand each other. We never need conversation, or vibrations in the air, to prove that we care about each other.

Backman just captures human emotion so well — I personally find every word he writes so so soo rewarding to read, although some people think of it as slow, convoluted, or even sappy with too much emotion. I’ve always loved everything Roald Dahl has written, with every little story similar in style and impact. Fredrik Backman is the first author I’ve read who is on par with Roald Dahl, in how deep and similarly gratifying each of his independent stories is.

To close, I want to quote Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye here, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”