Seven-year-old Elsa's grandmother, the one who introduced her to the magical kingdom of Miamas where she travels every night in her dreams, has died of cancer. Now Elsa must complete one last quest (for she is a knight of Miamas) for her grandmother by delivering letters in a scavenger hunt -- when she delivers one letter, she finds another.

This book tries very hard. It often fails. There are big things, such as how it tries very hard to be an omniscient third person narrator while also trying to get inside Elsa's head. There are little things, such as how Elsa's "secret language" with her grandmother is actually a real language: but when she finds out that Miamas is a word from that language that means "I love you" she doesn't know the definition?? This makes no sense. This is a pretty basic phrase, one that her grandmother surely would have said often.

The constant repetion of phrases is aggravating because it feels like Backman got really proud of a handful of sentences and then decided to use them over and over. At her grandmother's funeral, seven-year-old Elsa thinks to herself that the worst part of death is that it leaves those behind feeling like they don't want to live. Setting aside the fact that this is pretty hard to believe coming from a seven-year-old, she promptly finds herself in a dangerous situation and repeats the same sentence. This happens over and over and instead of being charming, it is jarring.

It also makes me crazy that there is a dog living in an apartment all alone and you never actually find out who the owner is. Is it supposed to be the grandmother? Why wouldn't she just let him live in her apartment????

None of the characters are likable except the grandmother, and she is dead.