She has a sunny disposition and loves to tell jokes, especially when she is trying to cheer up the people around her. As a child, Elsa lived happily with her mum until her mum fell in love with “Mack the Smack”, a Scottish man whom Elsa dislikes because he is extremely short-tempered and, as the nickname suggests, frequently uses smacking as a punishment. Elsa’s mum married Mack and together they had Pippa, Elsa’s nearly five-year-old sister, and Hank, her infant brother.
“Anastasia Krupnik was ten. She had hair the color of Hubbard squash, fourteen freckles across her nose (and seven others in places that she preferred people not to know about), and glasses with large owl-eyed rims, which se had chosen herself at the optician’s.”
A young girl like Linnea is allowed to travel to France without her family and even share a hotel room with an elderly gentleman who is not of her immediate family.