Book Review: The Granny Project

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Granny Project

Author: Anne Fine

Date: 1983

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

ISBN: none

Illustrations: 167 pages

Quote: “However, in spite of the very real difficulties of keeping an old person in the home...as many as __% are still living safely in the bosom of their own families...We chose to study one family in particular, the Harris family, because they so neatly illustrate...so many of the problems involved.”

Thus Sophie and Ivan Harris, revulsed by the thought of their beloved Granny Harris being sent to a nursing home, volunteer not only to take over Granny’s nursing care but to write about it for their school social science project. Younger siblings Tanya and Nicholas, and of course their English father and Russian mother, are part of the project too.

U.S. readers may think of Robin Williams rather than Anne Fine when they think of Mrs. Doubtfire, but Alias Madame Doubtfire was another of Anne Fine’s tersely hilarious, edgy, iconoclastic novels for teens-and-up. She also wrote Goggle-Eyes and The Chicken Gave It to Me. That’s the kind of writer she is. Nothing is sacred.

(U.S. readers may not have realized that these stories are British, more specifically Scottish. A British blogger’s protest about the portrayal of British characters in American fiction—as rich snobs or sinister spies—brought this to mind: Anne Fine’s characters are such down-to-earth, likable Brits that when a U.S. studio made a movie of Mrs. Doubtfire they recast the whole family as Americans.)

Mothers can be so busy being yuppies that, although they always knew their ex-husbands were talented actors, they don’t recognize their ex-husbands playing grandmothers and applying for the job of baby-sitter for their own children. Parents can be so bored with being “the sandwich generation” that they let the kids take full responsibility for their own parents. The Harris children are responsible, intelligent, likable, but not exactly honest; some of their plots to deceive and manipulate their parents succeed, and others fail. In 1983 the U.S. fad for “liberated” use of bad language coincided with a U.K. fad for “talking rude”; the “British Invasion” of U.S. pop culture was reaching its natural end, and one criticism I remember hearing of new British books, in 1982, was that British publishers were allowing more offensive words in books aimed at teenagers.

And all geriatric problems come to one final solution, eventually—and in this novel that end is mercifully near when Granny Harris starts to need a lot of nursing care. If you don’t like the idea of a grandmother’s death being part of a happy ending, you won’t like this book. However, Granny Harris is old enough to be her grandchildren’s great-grandmother before she starts forgetting their names.

In families where late marriage is traditional, anyone old enough to read this book has probably already lived through at least one loss-of-grandparent that prepared them to agree that the Harris family get off easily.

In families where early marriage is traditional, and grandparents may be nowhere near even retirement age, adults may want to use discretion about which children they allow to read this book. The absence of active, healthy grandparents might give young children false ideas.

Anyone old enough to know the difference between an 87-year-old senile grandparent and a 45-year-old yuppie-type grandparent might like The Granny Project. Whether the children’s schemes and lies self-punish more than they pay off is still open to debate, but parents might enjoy discussing it with their own teenagers.

What you’ll like, if you like this book, is the realistic, sympathetic, yet comic study of what home nursing is really like. Grandmother and grandchildren really do care about each other, so the Granny Project has many moments of joy. Home care for a character like Granny Harris has its funny moments, too. The Harris children are horrible brats in some ways, but for this type of story they may be ideal; before flu brings the whole project down, they at least begin to develop real characters, while being so uncivilized (half Russian—this was the Cold War) as to suggest to child readers that they could do what the Harris brats do, and better.

Meh. I was younger than little Tanya Harris when the one of my grandparents who was disabled before she died was living with us. I loved my disabled grandmother. Once in a while I was able to do something that showed it. I wasn’t nearly as good as Tanya is in this book.

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