“Perhaps the most important moments of all turn out to be the ones we walk through without thinking, the ones we mark down as just another day […] Elsie once said that you can’t tell how big a moment is until you turn back and look at it and I think, perhaps, that she was right.”
When I finished Three Things About Elsie it was one of the first books I had read in a while and I think it was just what I needed. I read it in mid-march and oh boy I’m so pleased to see it longlisted for the Women’s Prize!
If you know me irl, you will know that I love the elderly population, have an affinity with them you might say. I’ve worked with them for 5+ years and while i never had my own grandparents close to me as I was growing up – they are all I think about now. I’ve always wanted to be a grandmother from a young age. Weird, nah uh! Before I go completelty off on a tangent here I will just say that the elderly are some of the most inspiring people I’ve met – having lived through hardships we could never comprehend and so many of them are still so positive and filled with integrity.
“Every one of us is damaged. We need the faults, the breaks, the fracture lines. However else would all the light get in?”
Florence has fallen in her flat at Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly where she resides. She’s 83 years old. As she lays waiting to be found she reminisces about her life.
No it’s not all as depressing as that.
Cannon intertwines Florence’s thoughts with chapters of present time adventures that Florence has with her friends Elsie and Jack.
A new resident moves into the home and he looks suspiciously like someone from Florence’s past. Is he who he claims he is?
“It’s strange, because you can put up with all manner of nonsense in your life, all sorts of sadness, and you manage to keep everything on board and march through it, then someone is kind to you and it’s the kindness that makes you cry. It’s the tiny act of goodness that opens a door somewhere and lets all the misery escape.”
Cannon magically weaves a story about growing old with a mysterious twist and does it in such a heart wrenchingly beautiful way. Cannon shows us how each and every one of us is influenced by those around us, how the tiniest moments can leave the biggest influence, how the threads of humanity are all interconnected.
Three Things About Elsie is about the time in between, those long seconds we give ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves and each other and their ripple effect on those around us. To grow old one must be young at heart first.
“You can’t define yourself by a single moment. That moment doesn’t make you who are.”
4 1/2 stars from me. I adored this one and would love to see it shortlisted, would you? Have you read Joanna Cannon’s debut novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep? I’m going to have to now :’) Are you keeping up with the Women’s Prize longlist? Talk to me in the comments below,
for now
do svidaniya friends and foes
xx
the sugar cane diaries 