Swedish children's books
Being a school librarian, I like children's books quite a lot. (Well, there's the question of cause and effect there...) And in Sweden, a lot of children's books tend to be Swedish. Sure, we get the Anglo stuff, and some German and Danish and French stuff, and very occasionally some non-European, non-Anglo stuff (apart from the manga) that makes me jump with glee, but a lot of the books are Swedish.
Interestingly enough, that's not just because we're complete chauvinists who can't see further than our noses. Swedish children's literature is pretty good, and quite a lot of it is available in translation. And so I thought I'd rec some children's authors. Some of them actually haven't been translated, but I include them anyway, because I like them, because other Swedes like them (or may grow to like them if they hear of them), and because - in the case of the relatively new ones - they might be translated yet.
AIE means "Available in English", no surprise. :-) A "limited" following that means you won't find anything on Amazon, but might be able to dig it up in a library if you're really interested. (Obviously, for the Swedish readers, it's easier to find these authors, though libraries may still be recommended.)
So here they are, 20 Swedish children's authors in chronological order, starting from the ones who made their debut in the 19th century and moving on to today. This is a personal list, not a list of the 20 most important children's authors, though of course some names would make such a list as well.
Selma Lagerlöf (AIE)
Selma is included because her most internationally known novel is The Wonderful Adventures of Nils”, which is a children's story - but it is also, in its original language, a geography textbook. In other words, don't bother. Go straight to her short stories (suitable for various ages) or hit her adult masterpieces Jerusalem or The Emperor of Portugalia. Both of which are available in English through Project Gutenberg, so you don't even have to search out the actual books. :-)
What can I say about her? She has a fabulous way of mixing the romantic with the down-to-earth and folklore with realism. In the introduction to the American translation of Jerusalem, composer Hugo Alfvén is quoted as saying, "Selma Lagerlöf is like sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral ... afterward one does not know whether what he has seen was dream or reality, but certainly he has been on holy ground." She was an ugly duckling, disabled, a school marm, a lesbian - and she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize of literature, to be chosen into the Swedish academy, and her face is on the 20 SEK bill.
Elsa Beskow (AIE)
Another one of the "national saints", Elsa Beskow is a classic for the little children. My grandparents read her picture books, and my nephew loves them now. The storylines are nice enough, but it's as an illustrator she really shines. Behold the posters and postcards on this Canadian site. According to her publisher (oh yes, the books are still reprinted), she was the one who introduced Swedish children's lit to the outer world. Children of the Forest is probably the most beautifully illustrated of her books, but I'm also fond of the Aunt Green, Aunt Brown and Aunt Lavender books.
Astrid Lindgren (AIE)
Speaking of "national saints", Astrid Lindgren is the very definition of the word. Loving Astrid Lindgren, as I have explained before, is not voluntary. Fortunately, her body of work is both large and varied, so you're very likely to be able to find at least one book you can love to pieces. For me, it's primarily Ronia the Robber's Daughter (rowdy and touching adventure story), followed by the Mardie books (perfect mix of the idyllic and the tragic in a small town turn-of-the-century setting) and Mio my Son (pretty straight forward fantasy). And the Bill Bergson books (detective/adventure stories a la Blyton but better). Oh, and picture books The Dragon With Red Eyes and My Nightingale is Singing. I've heard the claim that Astrid's girls are always strong and self-sufficient while her boys are suffering (and that claim related to the fact that she gave up her son as a foster child), but the girl in MNIS may be the most heartbreaking char she's ever created.
For those of you who are Swedish and think you've read it all, try her teen books, they're lots fun too and can usually be found in library cellars or used book stores. Kati i Amerika may be my favourite, but if you've ever liked an old-fashioned girl book, you'll like them all.
Tove Jansson (AIE)
Okay, so including Tove is cheating a bit, since she's from Finland, but she's a Finland-Swede, so there. Forget the pastel-coloured, sugar-coated Moomintrolls you've seen on TV and go to the source. Her production ranges from picture books and comics to chapter books and novels for adults - though the latter obviously don't include the Moomin characters. She lived close to the sea and the books reflect that, showing that the world is big and dangerous but that this is fairly awesome. Why be afraid of the flood taking your house when you can move into a theatre and start a new life?
She's got an absurd sense of humour, irreverence for convention, great characters (the aggressive little My is a favourite with a lot of people including myself, though the calm Tooticki - based on her girlfriend - is fairly amazing too), and images that really capture the glory of the wild world. And here, have some comics, with a blog entry explaining why the books are even better.
Maria Gripe (AIE)
Sadly, the best of Gripe's books - the Shadow series - don't seem available in English. It's a slightly gothic, philosophical growing-up tale in four parts about two young girls, possibly half-sisters, one of whom happens to like dressing up as a boy and seducing anyone she can find. But I don't just like it for the cross dressing. I like it because it's YA stuff that assumes the reader is an intelligent person, because the other main character is a little grey mouse yet one of the richer characters I've seen in any kind of story, especially a YA one (I love children's books, but I have a hard time connecting to most YA literature), and because the world created is haunting and etheric yet very vivid and real.
I think the Shadow books are available in Spanish, but for those of you who need the English language, I suggest the fairy tale The Glassblower's Children, which has a similar atmosphere though the setting is much more fantasy-like. (It has also been made into an amazing movie with Stellan Skarsgård and Pernilla August - if you can get hold of it, do.) Hugo and Josephine is also very nice on the other end of the spectrum; a real-life kind of story about an odd little girl and an even odder (but very self-assured) little boy who become friends.
If there's a downside to MG, it's that there's not really any sense of humour in her books, but she's so magical and interesting that it seems like greed to demand humour too.
Gunnel Linde (AIE - limited)
Speaking of humour, Gunnel Linde has a great deal of it. The first of these authors to largely focus on the inner city rather than the countryside, she has a cheeky sense of fun about her stories and her characters are inventive and adventurous. My absolute favourite is Mamm- och pappsagor, a collection of short stories about parents - from the orphan who manufactures bottled parents for herself, to the boy who decides he wants to be the mother of a tiny plastic monster. Tacka vet jag Skorstensgränd, in translation as Chimney-Top Lane, is lots of fun too, as is Löjliga familjerna, about a bunch of very different families. (One family says yes to everything, another says no, one postpones everything and another has to do everything right now, and so on. Of course it works best if everyone works together!) She might be most well-known in Sweden for Den vita stenen, which also became a TV series, though it's quite atypical for a Gunnel Linde story in that it's a turn-of-the-century countryside story and that the lead character, Fia, is much more timid (at least at first) than her regular protagonists.
Apart from her books, she's known as one of the founders of BRIS - Barnens Rätt i Samhället (Children's Right in Society), a non-profit organisation that has phone lines etc. where children can turn for support. BRIS often works as advisors for the authorities concerning the strengthening of children's rights. BRIS and Linde herself were also very vocal advocates for the 1979 law against hitting children.
Claque/Anna-Lisa Wärnlöf (AIE - limited)
Claque is mostly forgotten (unfortunately!) even in Sweden, so I was both surprised and pleased to see that two of her books have actually been translated (though finding them might be a hassle): The Boy Upstairs and Fredrika's children. These are part of a loose trilogy that in Sweden is finished with Ingkvist - I'm not sure if that one has been transated or not. Fredrike/Fredrika of these two books is a headstrong, aggressive girl with a chip on her shoulder; hard for the characters to like, but easy for the readers to love. She captures that teenage attitude of "If you talk to me I'll scream! Why isn't anyone talking to me? Wah!" perfectly. (I'm so very relieved not to be a teenager anymore. God, what a rollercoaster!) Even in all her grr-ness, Fredrike can be both heartwarming and quirkily funny, like when she scoffs about "the boy upstairs": "Jag ska skicka honom ett vykort på Menlösa barns dag!" ("I will send him a card on Feast of the Holy Innocents" - the specific word for "innocent" can also mean "pointless" or "bland". I have no idea how that was translated in the official version!)
Not translated, but even more delightful than the Fredrike books for those who read Swedish, is the series of books about Pella. They're sort of a bridge between old-fashioned girl's books and modern YA books. Charming, witty, touching, thoughtful, and with neither the formulaic "girl in love" approach of the former group of books (though of course Pella does fall in love and get married eventually, because let's face it, lots of people do) or the formulaic "girl's life is ruined" approach of the latter. Pella is an average-looking, mostly sensible, thoughtful girl who lives a fairly ordinary life and has such astute observations about it that my dad and I regularly quote the books to each other with great delight. The quotes aren't always from Pella's own mouth - her friends and family offer their fair share. And a special mention must go to her boss in the two last books, the newspaper editor Tobis, who's gruff and acidic and... well, you know the type. Pella compares their relationship to that of a duckling and the first person the duckling sees coming out of the egg: "It must be trying, sometimes, to have a duckling at your heel. For Tobis, it seems even harder to kick the dumb animal away." When Pella goes freelance, Tobis gives her a parting gift and an advice: "The gift was four rolls of typewriter ribbon. The advice was shorter: 'Use them.' "
Ulf Stark (AIE)
Ulf Stark will always to me be the guy who wrote Dårfinkar och Dönickar, a book (and later TV series) about the 12-year-old girl Simone who starts a new school, is mistaken for a "Simon", and rather than correcting the mistake does her best to be a Simon. In other words, she becomes a boy by being treated like a boy. (Yeah, the name is no coincidence - Stark plays very deliberately with gender in this book.) :-) He's a funny author, often describing very quirky people, but often deals with serious subjects too - I think someone has died in pretty much every book of his I've read, for one thing.
Most widely-spread is Kan du vissla Johanna (translated as Can You Whistle, Johanna?), a thin book about a little boy who randomly "adopts" an old man at a retirement home as his grandfather. This book has been adapted to an hour-long TV film which is shown on Swedish TV every Christmas Eve, so if you're curious of Swedish culture that's definitely a book worth reading. Among the picture books I've also fallen for Min syster är en angel, where the protagonist's sister died before he was born, a knowledge he deals with by dressing up as his own sister and using her as his imaginary friend.
Katarina Taikon
Taikon's Katitzi books don't seem to be translated into English, which is interesting considering how widely read they were when I was a kid. They're autobiographical books about the author's childhood in a gypsy camp in the 30s and 40s, showcasing all the prejudice and maltreatment the families faced from the main society, as well as the wrongdoings going on within the camp (Katizi's stepmother beat her and she was married away at 13 to a man who raped her and beat her into miscarriage). Despite all the misery, this isn't just a tale of woe - the books contain the strong love between Katitzi and her siblings, the fun she has with her dog Swing and the friends she finds in the various places they live, all the lighter aspects of life as well as the darker ones. The reader is sort of expected to grow along with Katitzi, so that the early books are classed in the library as suitable for a much earlier age than the later ones.
Taikon wrote a bunch of other books as well (no mean feat for someone who only learned to read as an adult) and was a tireless advocate for Roma rights along with her sister Rosa (a renowned silversmith). They both helped change society's attitudes towards the Roma people, though it should be noted that the change also included an "assimilation" policy that has proven troublesome for the survival of Roma culture. Neither sister intended for that to happen, though they might have been blinded to the possibility by their own desire to escape their bad experiences. Katarina Taikon took severely ill in the early 80s and remained in a coma until her death 13 years later.
Barbro Lindgren (AIE)
Unrelated to Astrid Lindgren and a tad less famous, though still one of Sweden's most beloved children's authors. She has a very surreal, sometimes dark humour intermingled with serious subjects. (The author has battled depression quite a lot, and I think that shows, not just in her autobiographical YA books where she explicitly describes it, but in her gallows humour approach to life.) My favourite of her books is the trilogy of picture books about the Wild Baby, who wants to do everything that's dangerous. Sagan om den Lilla Farbrorn (translated as The Story of the Little Old Man) is also very sweet - the Little Old Man is bullied by the other old men and very unhappy, but I can reveal that the story has a happy ending. :-) A Worm's Tale also has a similar unhappy old man - this one meets a worm who becomes his best friend.
She's mostly known for her picture books (especially the ones about the toddler Max, Sam in English), but has also written chapter books, both the autobiographical ones mentioned earlier and a series about grandfather Dartanjang, father Loranga and son Masarin, which is so bizarre I never really warmed to it as a child. (According to sw. wikipedia - I have mostly forgotten - Dartanjang is a hypochondriac, Loranga is an anarchist who always wears a bathrobe and a tea cosy, and Masarin takes responsibility both for the two of them and for the lunatic great-grandfather who lives at the top of a pine tree in the woods. Um, yay?)
Gun-Britt Sundström
Gun-Britt Sundström is better known as a translator than as an author - well, actually she's not very well known at all, but since I already know her I keep seeing her name: translating Christine Nöstlinger, Max Velthuijs, Cora Sandel, George Eliot... I first noticed her as an author when Dad put Oppositionspartiet in my hands, telling me it was about my mother's high school class. I read it with great delight, not just because of the rare mentions of the girl based on my mother, but because it's one of the few YA books I read that seemed to have anything in common with my own reality. Okay, so it took place in the 60s, which is a very different school form, and I never had a large group of friends in school the way these girls do, but my off-school friends and I conversed in much the same way: a mix between in-jokes, quotes (though in our case more from movies than the literature these girls spoof) and sudden life-and-death seriousness. I love the way the protagonists react to boyfriends - while some of them fall very deeply in love, there are also moments like when two of the girls have found dates and one of them sends a note to the other saying, "I've changed my mind, can we trade guys?" the response of which is, "Fine, but then you'd better sweeten the deal with some marbles and one-eyed kittens." Next to the Pella books, this is the most I've recognized myself and my world in any YA books, and it's hardly surprising that the author is herself a great fan of Pella. (I asked her.)
There are some adult books and essay collections, most of which are very enjoyable. (Though her most famous books, Maken and För Lydia, never really worked for me - like most realistic fiction by other authors, they seem to have nothing to do with my reality.) For the younger crowd she's also written some picture books, and I'm insanely in love with Det underbara dagishemmet, about a little girl's love for her preschool. While it's a thin book with many pictures, it's quite grown up in its sense of humour, and I think it works best for kids of early school age and up, if they'll read it. It starts brilliantly with, "Being born was the hardest thing she'd ever done," but my favourite bit comes during the Christmas celebration: "God is real even though you can't see him. It's just like the king. He's real, but no one has seen him. Santa is the other way around. He's not real, you can just see him. No one at preschool believes in Santa, but he still shows up every Christmas and hands out presents. You can touch him too, even though he's not real."
Gunilla Bergström (AIE)
When my dad got a package once and asked, "Gunilla Bergström, who's that?" I replied "the woman who makes Alfie Atkins?" and then got INCREDIBLY SQUEE-Y when I realized that yes, the package was from THAT Gunilla Bergström, and she'd sent my dad the Arabic translation of one of her Alfie Atkins books because she liked dad's lectures. Alfie Atkins (Alfons Åberg in Swedish) is a fixture of my childhood. I had Alfie Atkins carboard figures hanging from my ceiling lamp. There are about a dozen different Alfie Atkins picture books of mine in my parents' closets. At work, we have two large blue boxes on wheels full of Alfie Atkins books, and yet they've each been borrowed multiple times. Not a day goes by without Alfie Atkins books being borrowed and returned.
They're really quite simple books. Alfie is a little boy, maybe six years old, who lives with his dad in an ordinary apartment. ("Where's Alfie's mom?" people often ask. "I don't know," the author always replies. "Maybe she's dead. Maybe she lives somewhere else. Maybe she's just out on an errand.") The books deal with trivial things like how much fun it is to tie everything into knots when you've just learned how to, and less trivial things like what it really means to be brave, or having a friend who's father's been in a real war.
Viveca Lärn / Sundvall (AIE)
All librarians get a little bit growly about Viveca Lärn. She wrote books for decades under the name Viveca Sundvall - and then she got a divorce and changed her name back to Lärn. Which is completely understandable, of course, but it makes shelving her books needlessly difficult. :-)
In either case, she's such a good author that's easily forgivable. At first, she wrote books that were mostly humourous, ranging from dry wit to slapstick. The most prominent was the series about 12-year-old Tekla and her best friend Ulle, and the series about Mimmi/Mimi, who starts out as 6 and then grows a year or so for each book. The Mimmi books eventually came to feature Mimmi's cocky best friend Anders, and then Anders' little brother Eddie - and then Eddie got his own books. Which were not primarily humourous. Eddie's father is an alcoholic, Anders has taken over the role as parent (in a previous post I compared him to a very young Dean Winchester), and Eddie himself is one of those wide-eyed, imaginative, brittle-looking characters that you keep fearing someone will squish as a bug. (Fortunately, he's more resilient than he seems.)
I quite resented the change as a kid, since I'd just started moving on from children's books to YA books, where authors then made a hobby of shoving more and more misery down the reader's throat. (Is the concept in Sweden known as "Idyllophobia" specific for Swedish YA authors, or is it more wide-spread than that, just without that word for it?) Nowadays, I love Eddie to pieces - he's so heartbreakingly naïve despite everything, and then you have Anders with the tough guy exterior and the mom instincts, and their dad trying to stay the right side up (in the second or third book, which was made into a TV series, he went to a place to "learn how to stop drinking beer"), and Axel the teacher who wants to be a good guy because no one was good to him when he was a kid, and, oh! * melts* (Yes, there are women in the books as well. Mimmi shows up in most of them, for one thing, and Eddie's friend Johanna, and Aunt Sofia. Generally speaking, they're tougher - not so much with the heartbreak, more with the admiration and love.)
Her books aren't easy to find in English (though they're readily available in German), but Amazon has a couple of the picture books in second hand if you search for Viveca Sundvall.
Sven Nordqvist (AIE)
Sven Nordqvist is the 21st century's Elsa Beskow. * grin* His stories are sweet and funny, but it's above all his very rich images, detailed and with lots of bizarre little creatures and items, that make the books a must-read. This desktop image is atypical in that it shows only things, no creatures, but it was the largest pic I could find that showcased just how long you can watch these things. For a slightly smaller, but creature-filled pic, try this, from a computer game. Perfect for a two-person read, in other words - the kid watches the images while the adult reads the text. (And then the adult wants to watch the images too until the kid goes, "Turn the paaaage!")
His most famous stories are the ones of the old man Pettson and his cat Findus (for some reason "Mercury" in English). They're charming and very funny, with a slapstick sense of humour. One of my favourite bits is when Pettson has promised Findus pancakes for his birthday, but he accidentally spills the eggs in the mud, slips, and sits down in them. When the neighbour passes by, Pettson is shoveling eggs from the mud into a bucket. "I'm gonna make pancakes for Findus's birthday," he explains, and when he notices that his trousers are eggy and muddy, he takes them off and puts them in the bucket too, figuring he can buy new ones. "What the heck, no need to be stingy on a birthday!" The neighbour, naturally, figures Pettson has lost his mind entirely.
Apart from the Pettson books, there are also among other things two charming books about the pig Nasse (one of which, Nasse hittar en stol, I once participated in an amateur theatre adaptation of), an alphabet book, and most recently a gorgeous picture book called Var är min syster (Where is my sister), which takes place in a sort of dream landscape and is thus even more breathtakingly bizarre than his other books. Sort of "Nordqvist cuts loose".
Pija Lindenbaum (AIE)
I have mentioned Pija Lindenbaum before - she's one of my favourites of new Swedish children's books authors/illustrators. Her picture books are cheeky fun, often about thoughtful children who may not play much with the other kids but whose rich inner lives are made real in the story and illustrations - the Gittan/Bridget books being the prime example. My favourite, as I've said repeatedly in my LJ, is Mini Mia and her Darling Uncle (orig. Lill-Zlatan och morbror Raring), in which the protagonist, Ella, is highly jealous when her favourite uncle brings home a new boyfriend. It's one of the very few children's books I've seen where gay people are included without it being some big issue, and that alone would recommend it - but it's also highly amusing, with a view of a child's emotions and reactions that's spot on.
Other fun books are Else-Marie and her Seven Little Daddies, Kenta och barbisarna (not yet translated), and When Owen's Mom Breathed Fire, about a boy whose mother gets turned into a dragon. My favourite scene in that book is when they go see the doctor who says, "Sorry, there's nothing I can do, that'll be 300 SEK." The dragon angrily pounds her tail, and the doctor squeaks, "Oh no, my mistake, it's free!" The illustration of the doctor is spot on. :-)
Pernilla Stalfelt (AIE)
Many of this author's books fall more or less into the fact section - she's written picture books about love, death, poop, hair, violence, and scary stuff (witches, vampires, ghosts etc). They're all kind of funny in a drastic way - though I notice on Amazon.com that the editorial reviews of The Death Book are a bit puzzled - surely you can't crack jokes like that about death to young readers? (It's clear I need to make another post when I have time on Swedish sense of humour vs. American sense of humour.)
The book that merits her for this list, though, is Gubben som grät, a thoroughly surreal book about a man who cries for any reason at all (because it's too long until Christmas, because his trousers shrank in the laundry...) until his house becomes so full of tears that he can't live in it anymore. Fortunately, the postman shows up with a parcel containing a bicycle. The man starts crying because he can't ride a bicycle, but a voice from above ("maybe it was God, or a loudspeaker") says: "Try anyway!" So he tries anyway, and learns how. That makes him so happy that he laughs loud enough for the windows to break in his house, which means all the tears pour out and water his garden. He can move back into his house again, and in the garden cabbages start to grow, so he can have cabbage rolls every day, which is his favourite dish and better than Christmas.
Like I said, thoroughly surreal. :-)
Petter Lidbeck
Petter Lidbeck is the first of four authors on this list who are so new they haven't been translated. Keep yur eyes open, there's good hope! Lidbeck has written on average two books a year for the past ten years, so naturally enough some are just good - but others are brilliant. My favourite may be Anna Larssons hemliga dagbok, where the protagonist, who feels she's plain and boring, writes a diary about everything that doesn't happen, fantasies where she's the best at everything and helps NASA communicate with God. The difference between the ”real” stuff and the diary makes the story very amusing, while it's also quite touching.
In a completely different vein, Lidbeck also writes thrillers, the best of which is Flickan utan minne, about a young girl who is discovered on a park bench, shook up and with no memory of who she is and how she got there. A woman turns up, claiming to be her mother, but as everyone the slightest bit genre-savvy knows, that's not her mother at all. Complete nailbiter kind of story. :-)
We'll get Lidbeck for an author talk this autumn. I'm very much looking forward to it - he's one of my absolute favourites of new authors!
Lin Hallberg
Lin Hallberg mostly writes horse books, that are enormously appreciated by the kids where I work, but which I haven't actually read. Shame on me. What I have read is the trilogy Kompisboken / Bästisboken / Svikarboken, also tremendously popular. They're realistic in the YA sense, meaning that they make other people go, "Wow, it's JUST LIKE in our class!" and me go, "Huh. People actually live like that?" but despite the initial emotional disconnect I found them engaging and believable (in the ”"internally consistent" sense). I also like that each book is from the POV of a new person (or persons) in the class.
Plus, she writes not only the regular kind of chaptered horse books, but also easier ones for girls of seven or eight. Not a lot of authors do that, so kudos for it.
Douglas Foley
It's kind of amusing that a guy called "Douglas Foley" has never been translated into English (he's originally Welsh, but writes in Swedish). I hope that'll be remedied some day, because Foley's books are a treat. He started out with YA books, but those I have yet to read. Instead I want to rec his books about 11 (later 12) years old Habib, living in Alby outside Stockholm and in love with the neighbour girl Paris. Habib is forced by his teacher to write a diary and does so reluctantly at first, but later with enthusiasm.
What I love about these books is that they're set in a suburb like Alby (sort of "ghetto light"), the main character is Syrian and his love interest Somalian, and yet they're not "problem books". Habib tries to find out the meaning of life. He hangs out with his grandmother. (Habib thinks the old ladies he meets are "cool" - which they are, but bless you kid for seeing it!) He and Paris have some troubles, but not because they're an interracial couple. (Well, couple and couple... they're 12. It's the "hang out and hold hands" kind of love.) He's just a kid, living a kid's life, with a kid's problems. For a Swedish children's book portraying that kind of area, it's incredibly rare.
Eva Bergström
The most recent of this authors, and a quick favourite of mine, is the creator of the obnoxious kitten Snurran. I adore Snurran so much I've contemplated getting her tattooed on my body. (Though I already have a cat, so sometimes I think I should get Lilla My - see Tove Jansson - instead. And it's not like I can afford a tattoo anyway.)
Snurran knows what she wants and what she doesn't want, and no one can win against her. In one of the books, she decides to eat only ketchup - and she does. In another, she's determined to carry her favourite perch with her everywhere, even though the fish is starting to stink. In a third, she keeps a tight grip on the remote control and refuses to let anyone else touch it. And in my favourite so far, she's at war against a "stupid coverall" that her parents try to make her wear. Among other things, she decides that the coverall has taken ill and died, and buries it in the sandbox. The war rages on for so long that her mother has to call her boss again and again saying that she'll be late for work. Finally the boss tells the mother to show up AT ONCE or get fired, so mother sighs and tells Snurran to wear what she likes.
"I think this is a beautiful coverall" says the last page, with an illustration of Snurran wearing a diver's mask and a tutu.
And that's it, folks! For those of you who haven't clicked the link yet, you might find it tl;dr, but consider the work I've put into it and browse the stuff you find interesting. ;-)
Interestingly enough, that's not just because we're complete chauvinists who can't see further than our noses. Swedish children's literature is pretty good, and quite a lot of it is available in translation. And so I thought I'd rec some children's authors. Some of them actually haven't been translated, but I include them anyway, because I like them, because other Swedes like them (or may grow to like them if they hear of them), and because - in the case of the relatively new ones - they might be translated yet.
AIE means "Available in English", no surprise. :-) A "limited" following that means you won't find anything on Amazon, but might be able to dig it up in a library if you're really interested. (Obviously, for the Swedish readers, it's easier to find these authors, though libraries may still be recommended.)
So here they are, 20 Swedish children's authors in chronological order, starting from the ones who made their debut in the 19th century and moving on to today. This is a personal list, not a list of the 20 most important children's authors, though of course some names would make such a list as well.
Selma Lagerlöf (AIE)
Selma is included because her most internationally known novel is The Wonderful Adventures of Nils”, which is a children's story - but it is also, in its original language, a geography textbook. In other words, don't bother. Go straight to her short stories (suitable for various ages) or hit her adult masterpieces Jerusalem or The Emperor of Portugalia. Both of which are available in English through Project Gutenberg, so you don't even have to search out the actual books. :-)
What can I say about her? She has a fabulous way of mixing the romantic with the down-to-earth and folklore with realism. In the introduction to the American translation of Jerusalem, composer Hugo Alfvén is quoted as saying, "Selma Lagerlöf is like sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral ... afterward one does not know whether what he has seen was dream or reality, but certainly he has been on holy ground." She was an ugly duckling, disabled, a school marm, a lesbian - and she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize of literature, to be chosen into the Swedish academy, and her face is on the 20 SEK bill.
Elsa Beskow (AIE)
Another one of the "national saints", Elsa Beskow is a classic for the little children. My grandparents read her picture books, and my nephew loves them now. The storylines are nice enough, but it's as an illustrator she really shines. Behold the posters and postcards on this Canadian site. According to her publisher (oh yes, the books are still reprinted), she was the one who introduced Swedish children's lit to the outer world. Children of the Forest is probably the most beautifully illustrated of her books, but I'm also fond of the Aunt Green, Aunt Brown and Aunt Lavender books.
Astrid Lindgren (AIE)
Speaking of "national saints", Astrid Lindgren is the very definition of the word. Loving Astrid Lindgren, as I have explained before, is not voluntary. Fortunately, her body of work is both large and varied, so you're very likely to be able to find at least one book you can love to pieces. For me, it's primarily Ronia the Robber's Daughter (rowdy and touching adventure story), followed by the Mardie books (perfect mix of the idyllic and the tragic in a small town turn-of-the-century setting) and Mio my Son (pretty straight forward fantasy). And the Bill Bergson books (detective/adventure stories a la Blyton but better). Oh, and picture books The Dragon With Red Eyes and My Nightingale is Singing. I've heard the claim that Astrid's girls are always strong and self-sufficient while her boys are suffering (and that claim related to the fact that she gave up her son as a foster child), but the girl in MNIS may be the most heartbreaking char she's ever created.
For those of you who are Swedish and think you've read it all, try her teen books, they're lots fun too and can usually be found in library cellars or used book stores. Kati i Amerika may be my favourite, but if you've ever liked an old-fashioned girl book, you'll like them all.
Tove Jansson (AIE)
Okay, so including Tove is cheating a bit, since she's from Finland, but she's a Finland-Swede, so there. Forget the pastel-coloured, sugar-coated Moomintrolls you've seen on TV and go to the source. Her production ranges from picture books and comics to chapter books and novels for adults - though the latter obviously don't include the Moomin characters. She lived close to the sea and the books reflect that, showing that the world is big and dangerous but that this is fairly awesome. Why be afraid of the flood taking your house when you can move into a theatre and start a new life?
She's got an absurd sense of humour, irreverence for convention, great characters (the aggressive little My is a favourite with a lot of people including myself, though the calm Tooticki - based on her girlfriend - is fairly amazing too), and images that really capture the glory of the wild world. And here, have some comics, with a blog entry explaining why the books are even better.
Maria Gripe (AIE)
Sadly, the best of Gripe's books - the Shadow series - don't seem available in English. It's a slightly gothic, philosophical growing-up tale in four parts about two young girls, possibly half-sisters, one of whom happens to like dressing up as a boy and seducing anyone she can find. But I don't just like it for the cross dressing. I like it because it's YA stuff that assumes the reader is an intelligent person, because the other main character is a little grey mouse yet one of the richer characters I've seen in any kind of story, especially a YA one (I love children's books, but I have a hard time connecting to most YA literature), and because the world created is haunting and etheric yet very vivid and real.
I think the Shadow books are available in Spanish, but for those of you who need the English language, I suggest the fairy tale The Glassblower's Children, which has a similar atmosphere though the setting is much more fantasy-like. (It has also been made into an amazing movie with Stellan Skarsgård and Pernilla August - if you can get hold of it, do.) Hugo and Josephine is also very nice on the other end of the spectrum; a real-life kind of story about an odd little girl and an even odder (but very self-assured) little boy who become friends.
If there's a downside to MG, it's that there's not really any sense of humour in her books, but she's so magical and interesting that it seems like greed to demand humour too.
Gunnel Linde (AIE - limited)
Speaking of humour, Gunnel Linde has a great deal of it. The first of these authors to largely focus on the inner city rather than the countryside, she has a cheeky sense of fun about her stories and her characters are inventive and adventurous. My absolute favourite is Mamm- och pappsagor, a collection of short stories about parents - from the orphan who manufactures bottled parents for herself, to the boy who decides he wants to be the mother of a tiny plastic monster. Tacka vet jag Skorstensgränd, in translation as Chimney-Top Lane, is lots of fun too, as is Löjliga familjerna, about a bunch of very different families. (One family says yes to everything, another says no, one postpones everything and another has to do everything right now, and so on. Of course it works best if everyone works together!) She might be most well-known in Sweden for Den vita stenen, which also became a TV series, though it's quite atypical for a Gunnel Linde story in that it's a turn-of-the-century countryside story and that the lead character, Fia, is much more timid (at least at first) than her regular protagonists.
Apart from her books, she's known as one of the founders of BRIS - Barnens Rätt i Samhället (Children's Right in Society), a non-profit organisation that has phone lines etc. where children can turn for support. BRIS often works as advisors for the authorities concerning the strengthening of children's rights. BRIS and Linde herself were also very vocal advocates for the 1979 law against hitting children.
Claque/Anna-Lisa Wärnlöf (AIE - limited)
Claque is mostly forgotten (unfortunately!) even in Sweden, so I was both surprised and pleased to see that two of her books have actually been translated (though finding them might be a hassle): The Boy Upstairs and Fredrika's children. These are part of a loose trilogy that in Sweden is finished with Ingkvist - I'm not sure if that one has been transated or not. Fredrike/Fredrika of these two books is a headstrong, aggressive girl with a chip on her shoulder; hard for the characters to like, but easy for the readers to love. She captures that teenage attitude of "If you talk to me I'll scream! Why isn't anyone talking to me? Wah!" perfectly. (I'm so very relieved not to be a teenager anymore. God, what a rollercoaster!) Even in all her grr-ness, Fredrike can be both heartwarming and quirkily funny, like when she scoffs about "the boy upstairs": "Jag ska skicka honom ett vykort på Menlösa barns dag!" ("I will send him a card on Feast of the Holy Innocents" - the specific word for "innocent" can also mean "pointless" or "bland". I have no idea how that was translated in the official version!)
Not translated, but even more delightful than the Fredrike books for those who read Swedish, is the series of books about Pella. They're sort of a bridge between old-fashioned girl's books and modern YA books. Charming, witty, touching, thoughtful, and with neither the formulaic "girl in love" approach of the former group of books (though of course Pella does fall in love and get married eventually, because let's face it, lots of people do) or the formulaic "girl's life is ruined" approach of the latter. Pella is an average-looking, mostly sensible, thoughtful girl who lives a fairly ordinary life and has such astute observations about it that my dad and I regularly quote the books to each other with great delight. The quotes aren't always from Pella's own mouth - her friends and family offer their fair share. And a special mention must go to her boss in the two last books, the newspaper editor Tobis, who's gruff and acidic and... well, you know the type. Pella compares their relationship to that of a duckling and the first person the duckling sees coming out of the egg: "It must be trying, sometimes, to have a duckling at your heel. For Tobis, it seems even harder to kick the dumb animal away." When Pella goes freelance, Tobis gives her a parting gift and an advice: "The gift was four rolls of typewriter ribbon. The advice was shorter: 'Use them.' "
Ulf Stark (AIE)
Ulf Stark will always to me be the guy who wrote Dårfinkar och Dönickar, a book (and later TV series) about the 12-year-old girl Simone who starts a new school, is mistaken for a "Simon", and rather than correcting the mistake does her best to be a Simon. In other words, she becomes a boy by being treated like a boy. (Yeah, the name is no coincidence - Stark plays very deliberately with gender in this book.) :-) He's a funny author, often describing very quirky people, but often deals with serious subjects too - I think someone has died in pretty much every book of his I've read, for one thing.
Most widely-spread is Kan du vissla Johanna (translated as Can You Whistle, Johanna?), a thin book about a little boy who randomly "adopts" an old man at a retirement home as his grandfather. This book has been adapted to an hour-long TV film which is shown on Swedish TV every Christmas Eve, so if you're curious of Swedish culture that's definitely a book worth reading. Among the picture books I've also fallen for Min syster är en angel, where the protagonist's sister died before he was born, a knowledge he deals with by dressing up as his own sister and using her as his imaginary friend.
Katarina Taikon
Taikon's Katitzi books don't seem to be translated into English, which is interesting considering how widely read they were when I was a kid. They're autobiographical books about the author's childhood in a gypsy camp in the 30s and 40s, showcasing all the prejudice and maltreatment the families faced from the main society, as well as the wrongdoings going on within the camp (Katizi's stepmother beat her and she was married away at 13 to a man who raped her and beat her into miscarriage). Despite all the misery, this isn't just a tale of woe - the books contain the strong love between Katitzi and her siblings, the fun she has with her dog Swing and the friends she finds in the various places they live, all the lighter aspects of life as well as the darker ones. The reader is sort of expected to grow along with Katitzi, so that the early books are classed in the library as suitable for a much earlier age than the later ones.
Taikon wrote a bunch of other books as well (no mean feat for someone who only learned to read as an adult) and was a tireless advocate for Roma rights along with her sister Rosa (a renowned silversmith). They both helped change society's attitudes towards the Roma people, though it should be noted that the change also included an "assimilation" policy that has proven troublesome for the survival of Roma culture. Neither sister intended for that to happen, though they might have been blinded to the possibility by their own desire to escape their bad experiences. Katarina Taikon took severely ill in the early 80s and remained in a coma until her death 13 years later.
Barbro Lindgren (AIE)
Unrelated to Astrid Lindgren and a tad less famous, though still one of Sweden's most beloved children's authors. She has a very surreal, sometimes dark humour intermingled with serious subjects. (The author has battled depression quite a lot, and I think that shows, not just in her autobiographical YA books where she explicitly describes it, but in her gallows humour approach to life.) My favourite of her books is the trilogy of picture books about the Wild Baby, who wants to do everything that's dangerous. Sagan om den Lilla Farbrorn (translated as The Story of the Little Old Man) is also very sweet - the Little Old Man is bullied by the other old men and very unhappy, but I can reveal that the story has a happy ending. :-) A Worm's Tale also has a similar unhappy old man - this one meets a worm who becomes his best friend.
She's mostly known for her picture books (especially the ones about the toddler Max, Sam in English), but has also written chapter books, both the autobiographical ones mentioned earlier and a series about grandfather Dartanjang, father Loranga and son Masarin, which is so bizarre I never really warmed to it as a child. (According to sw. wikipedia - I have mostly forgotten - Dartanjang is a hypochondriac, Loranga is an anarchist who always wears a bathrobe and a tea cosy, and Masarin takes responsibility both for the two of them and for the lunatic great-grandfather who lives at the top of a pine tree in the woods. Um, yay?)
Gun-Britt Sundström
Gun-Britt Sundström is better known as a translator than as an author - well, actually she's not very well known at all, but since I already know her I keep seeing her name: translating Christine Nöstlinger, Max Velthuijs, Cora Sandel, George Eliot... I first noticed her as an author when Dad put Oppositionspartiet in my hands, telling me it was about my mother's high school class. I read it with great delight, not just because of the rare mentions of the girl based on my mother, but because it's one of the few YA books I read that seemed to have anything in common with my own reality. Okay, so it took place in the 60s, which is a very different school form, and I never had a large group of friends in school the way these girls do, but my off-school friends and I conversed in much the same way: a mix between in-jokes, quotes (though in our case more from movies than the literature these girls spoof) and sudden life-and-death seriousness. I love the way the protagonists react to boyfriends - while some of them fall very deeply in love, there are also moments like when two of the girls have found dates and one of them sends a note to the other saying, "I've changed my mind, can we trade guys?" the response of which is, "Fine, but then you'd better sweeten the deal with some marbles and one-eyed kittens." Next to the Pella books, this is the most I've recognized myself and my world in any YA books, and it's hardly surprising that the author is herself a great fan of Pella. (I asked her.)
There are some adult books and essay collections, most of which are very enjoyable. (Though her most famous books, Maken and För Lydia, never really worked for me - like most realistic fiction by other authors, they seem to have nothing to do with my reality.) For the younger crowd she's also written some picture books, and I'm insanely in love with Det underbara dagishemmet, about a little girl's love for her preschool. While it's a thin book with many pictures, it's quite grown up in its sense of humour, and I think it works best for kids of early school age and up, if they'll read it. It starts brilliantly with, "Being born was the hardest thing she'd ever done," but my favourite bit comes during the Christmas celebration: "God is real even though you can't see him. It's just like the king. He's real, but no one has seen him. Santa is the other way around. He's not real, you can just see him. No one at preschool believes in Santa, but he still shows up every Christmas and hands out presents. You can touch him too, even though he's not real."
Gunilla Bergström (AIE)
When my dad got a package once and asked, "Gunilla Bergström, who's that?" I replied "the woman who makes Alfie Atkins?" and then got INCREDIBLY SQUEE-Y when I realized that yes, the package was from THAT Gunilla Bergström, and she'd sent my dad the Arabic translation of one of her Alfie Atkins books because she liked dad's lectures. Alfie Atkins (Alfons Åberg in Swedish) is a fixture of my childhood. I had Alfie Atkins carboard figures hanging from my ceiling lamp. There are about a dozen different Alfie Atkins picture books of mine in my parents' closets. At work, we have two large blue boxes on wheels full of Alfie Atkins books, and yet they've each been borrowed multiple times. Not a day goes by without Alfie Atkins books being borrowed and returned.
They're really quite simple books. Alfie is a little boy, maybe six years old, who lives with his dad in an ordinary apartment. ("Where's Alfie's mom?" people often ask. "I don't know," the author always replies. "Maybe she's dead. Maybe she lives somewhere else. Maybe she's just out on an errand.") The books deal with trivial things like how much fun it is to tie everything into knots when you've just learned how to, and less trivial things like what it really means to be brave, or having a friend who's father's been in a real war.
Viveca Lärn / Sundvall (AIE)
All librarians get a little bit growly about Viveca Lärn. She wrote books for decades under the name Viveca Sundvall - and then she got a divorce and changed her name back to Lärn. Which is completely understandable, of course, but it makes shelving her books needlessly difficult. :-)
In either case, she's such a good author that's easily forgivable. At first, she wrote books that were mostly humourous, ranging from dry wit to slapstick. The most prominent was the series about 12-year-old Tekla and her best friend Ulle, and the series about Mimmi/Mimi, who starts out as 6 and then grows a year or so for each book. The Mimmi books eventually came to feature Mimmi's cocky best friend Anders, and then Anders' little brother Eddie - and then Eddie got his own books. Which were not primarily humourous. Eddie's father is an alcoholic, Anders has taken over the role as parent (in a previous post I compared him to a very young Dean Winchester), and Eddie himself is one of those wide-eyed, imaginative, brittle-looking characters that you keep fearing someone will squish as a bug. (Fortunately, he's more resilient than he seems.)
I quite resented the change as a kid, since I'd just started moving on from children's books to YA books, where authors then made a hobby of shoving more and more misery down the reader's throat. (Is the concept in Sweden known as "Idyllophobia" specific for Swedish YA authors, or is it more wide-spread than that, just without that word for it?) Nowadays, I love Eddie to pieces - he's so heartbreakingly naïve despite everything, and then you have Anders with the tough guy exterior and the mom instincts, and their dad trying to stay the right side up (in the second or third book, which was made into a TV series, he went to a place to "learn how to stop drinking beer"), and Axel the teacher who wants to be a good guy because no one was good to him when he was a kid, and, oh! * melts* (Yes, there are women in the books as well. Mimmi shows up in most of them, for one thing, and Eddie's friend Johanna, and Aunt Sofia. Generally speaking, they're tougher - not so much with the heartbreak, more with the admiration and love.)
Her books aren't easy to find in English (though they're readily available in German), but Amazon has a couple of the picture books in second hand if you search for Viveca Sundvall.
Sven Nordqvist (AIE)
Sven Nordqvist is the 21st century's Elsa Beskow. * grin* His stories are sweet and funny, but it's above all his very rich images, detailed and with lots of bizarre little creatures and items, that make the books a must-read. This desktop image is atypical in that it shows only things, no creatures, but it was the largest pic I could find that showcased just how long you can watch these things. For a slightly smaller, but creature-filled pic, try this, from a computer game. Perfect for a two-person read, in other words - the kid watches the images while the adult reads the text. (And then the adult wants to watch the images too until the kid goes, "Turn the paaaage!")
His most famous stories are the ones of the old man Pettson and his cat Findus (for some reason "Mercury" in English). They're charming and very funny, with a slapstick sense of humour. One of my favourite bits is when Pettson has promised Findus pancakes for his birthday, but he accidentally spills the eggs in the mud, slips, and sits down in them. When the neighbour passes by, Pettson is shoveling eggs from the mud into a bucket. "I'm gonna make pancakes for Findus's birthday," he explains, and when he notices that his trousers are eggy and muddy, he takes them off and puts them in the bucket too, figuring he can buy new ones. "What the heck, no need to be stingy on a birthday!" The neighbour, naturally, figures Pettson has lost his mind entirely.
Apart from the Pettson books, there are also among other things two charming books about the pig Nasse (one of which, Nasse hittar en stol, I once participated in an amateur theatre adaptation of), an alphabet book, and most recently a gorgeous picture book called Var är min syster (Where is my sister), which takes place in a sort of dream landscape and is thus even more breathtakingly bizarre than his other books. Sort of "Nordqvist cuts loose".
Pija Lindenbaum (AIE)
I have mentioned Pija Lindenbaum before - she's one of my favourites of new Swedish children's books authors/illustrators. Her picture books are cheeky fun, often about thoughtful children who may not play much with the other kids but whose rich inner lives are made real in the story and illustrations - the Gittan/Bridget books being the prime example. My favourite, as I've said repeatedly in my LJ, is Mini Mia and her Darling Uncle (orig. Lill-Zlatan och morbror Raring), in which the protagonist, Ella, is highly jealous when her favourite uncle brings home a new boyfriend. It's one of the very few children's books I've seen where gay people are included without it being some big issue, and that alone would recommend it - but it's also highly amusing, with a view of a child's emotions and reactions that's spot on.
Other fun books are Else-Marie and her Seven Little Daddies, Kenta och barbisarna (not yet translated), and When Owen's Mom Breathed Fire, about a boy whose mother gets turned into a dragon. My favourite scene in that book is when they go see the doctor who says, "Sorry, there's nothing I can do, that'll be 300 SEK." The dragon angrily pounds her tail, and the doctor squeaks, "Oh no, my mistake, it's free!" The illustration of the doctor is spot on. :-)
Pernilla Stalfelt (AIE)
Many of this author's books fall more or less into the fact section - she's written picture books about love, death, poop, hair, violence, and scary stuff (witches, vampires, ghosts etc). They're all kind of funny in a drastic way - though I notice on Amazon.com that the editorial reviews of The Death Book are a bit puzzled - surely you can't crack jokes like that about death to young readers? (It's clear I need to make another post when I have time on Swedish sense of humour vs. American sense of humour.)
The book that merits her for this list, though, is Gubben som grät, a thoroughly surreal book about a man who cries for any reason at all (because it's too long until Christmas, because his trousers shrank in the laundry...) until his house becomes so full of tears that he can't live in it anymore. Fortunately, the postman shows up with a parcel containing a bicycle. The man starts crying because he can't ride a bicycle, but a voice from above ("maybe it was God, or a loudspeaker") says: "Try anyway!" So he tries anyway, and learns how. That makes him so happy that he laughs loud enough for the windows to break in his house, which means all the tears pour out and water his garden. He can move back into his house again, and in the garden cabbages start to grow, so he can have cabbage rolls every day, which is his favourite dish and better than Christmas.
Like I said, thoroughly surreal. :-)
Petter Lidbeck
Petter Lidbeck is the first of four authors on this list who are so new they haven't been translated. Keep yur eyes open, there's good hope! Lidbeck has written on average two books a year for the past ten years, so naturally enough some are just good - but others are brilliant. My favourite may be Anna Larssons hemliga dagbok, where the protagonist, who feels she's plain and boring, writes a diary about everything that doesn't happen, fantasies where she's the best at everything and helps NASA communicate with God. The difference between the ”real” stuff and the diary makes the story very amusing, while it's also quite touching.
In a completely different vein, Lidbeck also writes thrillers, the best of which is Flickan utan minne, about a young girl who is discovered on a park bench, shook up and with no memory of who she is and how she got there. A woman turns up, claiming to be her mother, but as everyone the slightest bit genre-savvy knows, that's not her mother at all. Complete nailbiter kind of story. :-)
We'll get Lidbeck for an author talk this autumn. I'm very much looking forward to it - he's one of my absolute favourites of new authors!
Lin Hallberg
Lin Hallberg mostly writes horse books, that are enormously appreciated by the kids where I work, but which I haven't actually read. Shame on me. What I have read is the trilogy Kompisboken / Bästisboken / Svikarboken, also tremendously popular. They're realistic in the YA sense, meaning that they make other people go, "Wow, it's JUST LIKE in our class!" and me go, "Huh. People actually live like that?" but despite the initial emotional disconnect I found them engaging and believable (in the ”"internally consistent" sense). I also like that each book is from the POV of a new person (or persons) in the class.
Plus, she writes not only the regular kind of chaptered horse books, but also easier ones for girls of seven or eight. Not a lot of authors do that, so kudos for it.
Douglas Foley
It's kind of amusing that a guy called "Douglas Foley" has never been translated into English (he's originally Welsh, but writes in Swedish). I hope that'll be remedied some day, because Foley's books are a treat. He started out with YA books, but those I have yet to read. Instead I want to rec his books about 11 (later 12) years old Habib, living in Alby outside Stockholm and in love with the neighbour girl Paris. Habib is forced by his teacher to write a diary and does so reluctantly at first, but later with enthusiasm.
What I love about these books is that they're set in a suburb like Alby (sort of "ghetto light"), the main character is Syrian and his love interest Somalian, and yet they're not "problem books". Habib tries to find out the meaning of life. He hangs out with his grandmother. (Habib thinks the old ladies he meets are "cool" - which they are, but bless you kid for seeing it!) He and Paris have some troubles, but not because they're an interracial couple. (Well, couple and couple... they're 12. It's the "hang out and hold hands" kind of love.) He's just a kid, living a kid's life, with a kid's problems. For a Swedish children's book portraying that kind of area, it's incredibly rare.
Eva Bergström
The most recent of this authors, and a quick favourite of mine, is the creator of the obnoxious kitten Snurran. I adore Snurran so much I've contemplated getting her tattooed on my body. (Though I already have a cat, so sometimes I think I should get Lilla My - see Tove Jansson - instead. And it's not like I can afford a tattoo anyway.)
Snurran knows what she wants and what she doesn't want, and no one can win against her. In one of the books, she decides to eat only ketchup - and she does. In another, she's determined to carry her favourite perch with her everywhere, even though the fish is starting to stink. In a third, she keeps a tight grip on the remote control and refuses to let anyone else touch it. And in my favourite so far, she's at war against a "stupid coverall" that her parents try to make her wear. Among other things, she decides that the coverall has taken ill and died, and buries it in the sandbox. The war rages on for so long that her mother has to call her boss again and again saying that she'll be late for work. Finally the boss tells the mother to show up AT ONCE or get fired, so mother sighs and tells Snurran to wear what she likes.
"I think this is a beautiful coverall" says the last page, with an illustration of Snurran wearing a diver's mask and a tutu.
And that's it, folks! For those of you who haven't clicked the link yet, you might find it tl;dr, but consider the work I've put into it and browse the stuff you find interesting. ;-)