Warning: spoilers.
When I said I was looking for things to review on this blog, my mother (who is part of a book group) gave me some suggestions and lent me some books, and The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg was one of them.
Originally published in Swedish as Kaffe med rån (translation: Coffee with robbery) in 2012, The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules follows the exploits of the "League of Pensioners", a group led by a woman called Martha Andersson, a 79-year-old woman who "dreams of escaping her care home and robbing a bank". After reading the blurb I thought the book sounded like it would be a lot of fun to read, and I started reading it on my commute to and from work.
My immediate reaction upon finishing the book was "that was so much fun!" and that I was so glad the book had a really happy ending. I was fully expecting a bittersweet ending where one of the pensioners died of old age or something like that but for them to actually get to the end of the novel with nothing as sad as that happening (for the League of Pensioners or the various side characters) was a nice surprise. I expected it because quite often I think writers like to have final act twists as something tragic that saddens the characters and readers, so it was good to have that not be the case here. All the twists are in the overall spirit of the novel, which is relatively light-hearted considering the subject matter of crime and imprisonment.
The plot moves at a steady pace, only slowing down very occasionally (for instance, when the League of Pensioners is staying at the Grand Hotel) and even when I found I put the novel aside for some time, I also found that picking it back up again was easy to do.
The thing that I feel gives most to the story is the characters. From Martha's friends in the League of Pensioners (inventor Brains, fashionable Christina, ladies-man Rake and old-fashioned Anna-Greta) to the villainous Nurse Barbara and Director Mattson and other side characters, Ingelman-Sundberg gives all of them clear motivations and concisely offers information about them to make them seem very human to the reader. Every character seems three dimensional, and the League of Pensioners in particular have a lot of heart and personality. In terms of side-characters I particularly liked the art student Petra and the two policemen who feature more prominently towards the end of the story.
Additionally, the concise and matter-of-fact tone of the narration makes the events and even the plans for the various crimes throughout easy for the reader to understand without sounding implausible as crimes. The tone also adds to the humour of the novel, from the opening bank robbery dream sequence to the epilogue with the police officer dismissing the letter from the League of Pensioners, at every turn the novel is very funny and ultimately heart-warming. As well as this, the loose-ends are all tied off (or at the very least addressed) by the end of the novel, which felt very satisfying to me as a reader.
While my Swedish is not nearly good enough to be able to read the original and judge the translation, from what I can gather it seems successful. At only one point in the novel does a joke need to be explained, but once it has been explained (again, very concisely) the joke is and remains very funny for the rest of the novel whenever it reappears.
Overall, I found The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules to be an absolute delight from beginning to end. The characters are relatable (even to those who don't use Zimmer frames!) and the crimes (especially the robbery of the paintings) are all well thought-out. Ingelman-Sundberg plays cheerfully with tropes from crime and detective novels and makes the whole story an extremely fun ride to be on.
Have you read The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules (either in the original Swedish or in translation)? What are your thoughts on it?
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