The Red Address Book

A sweet novel with a slow, winding plot that takes a look back at Doris Alm’s life.  Author, Sofia Lundberg writes about Doris Alms, now a 96 year old Swedish woman, who does not want to be thought of as old, who has lived a life full to the brim.  She has lived through very tough times, the horrors of Word War II and also had some incredible adventures, being a fashion model in 1930s Paris. She starts off being sent away from a poor family into servitude as a maid at the age of 13. There, though she has to work very hard for her difficult employer, she meets some eccentric characters who will continue to shape the rest of her life.  Some of the people she reminisces about she has been involved with for a short amount of time, others are recurring through different stages of her life.

Now, as Doris sits at home alone in her apartment waiting for the caretaker to come bring her a meal and help her take a shower, she recalls all the experiences of her life.  To help her put her memories in order she writes about all the people who came and went along through this long life lived over the past eighty years.  Reading each name in her red address book, she marks them off as dead and writes about their connections to her life.  She is intent on recording her memories for her great niece.

Going through her address book everyone in her life is dead except for her great niece, Jenny.  Jenny lives with her husband and three children across the ocean in San Francisco and visits with her Great Aunt, her only living relative, through Skype on a regular basis.  Jenny is experiencing her own doubts and troubles, balancing being a mother to young children and questioning her marriage.  In small segments we learn about Jenny's life and how the connection between Doris and Jenny developed and became such a strong family dynamic.  Doris has some wonderful advice to share with Jenny from all her life experiences.  My favorite piece of advice, "May there be enough sun to light up your days, enough rain to make you appreciate the sun."

We learn a bit of the lifestyles of the early nineteenth century as we hear about Doris's exploits.  Though there is always someone to rescue her just in the nick of time, Doris works through being broke and unemployed in New York and being torpedoed on a ship during World War II.  Some of the people she meets are helpful others are more dangerous.  There is the Swede on the bus in New York who offers her a home, a sailor on a dark pier who helps her board the ship bound for Europe.
In the end it was a three tissue book.  Lovely and sweet.