Article September 3, 2012 Issue

Hip, hip, hooray!

Kim Shippey

Sarah Gall’s book Once upon a Grandma, written under the name Sarah Helen Harrison, is as gentle and encouraging as the grandmother she writes about. As the blurb makes clear, the book is “guaranteed not to disturb your peace of mind,” and is “best read with a cup of tea in hand.” The illustrations, by the way, are also Sarah’s.

You don’t have to be British, or even an Anglophile, to get the humor (spelled humour) that ripples across every page, or feel the discomfort of a “shingle” beach (armored with pebbles), or the satisfying wickedness of a “cream tea”—but it helps!

In a nutshell—or perhaps a seashell—Once upon a Grandma (available through Amazon) is a fictional memoir of a young girl’s holidays (not vacations!) with her grandparents in the English countryside in the 1960s and 1970s. Nostalgia is laid on with a bucket and spade, yet, as Sarah says, “I was aiming to write something completely happy but not twee [uncomfortably sweet], to pass on to others a version of my own childhood memories with, I hope, a healing effect.” 

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