Britt-Mari lättar sitt hjärta (Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd. 2003)
Author: Astrid Lindgren
Translator: Toshiko Ishii
*original first published in1945
This is a book in the form of letters written by a 15-year-old Swedish Britt-Mari (b. 1928), to her pen pal Kaisa in Stockholm.
(I remember when I was a kid, there were columns in magazines looking for pen pals in Japan and also abroad. I also enjoyed purchasing letter papers, envelopes, and stamps and wrote letters to my friends. Now that we have email, times have changed completely.)
This is Lindgren’s debut work. I found the book at the International Library of Children’s Literature in Ueno and read it for the first time. Speaking of Lindgren, the published might be Iwanami Shoten, so I had no idea that this book was published by Tokuma Shobo in 2003.
Britt-Mari had a strong sense of justice and loved books, and the letters included many books that Britt-Mari were reading.
It is a very charming book that takes the reader into the life, the seasons, and the people of Sweden through the rich depictions of the days in Britt-Mari’s letters.
(Finish reading:12/14/2024)
