Play Book Tag discussion

Etta and Otto and Russell and James – Emma Hooper
3***

Eighty-two-year-old Etta has never seen the sea, so she decides one day to leave her Saskatchewan farm and head out on foot. She leaves behind her husband, Otto, and their neighbor, Russell. Along the way she encounters James, and a host of other characters.

The novel is told in a series of letters, messages, and vignettes that move back and forth in time, eventually revealing Etta’s and Otto’s and Russell’s stories, from their childhoods through the war years and into adulthood. It reminded me of Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, but it was not quite as engaging.

I think part of the reason is Hooper’s use of magical realism. In general, I like magical realism, but I didn’t quite warm to Hooper’s use in this case. James is a talking coyote, for example. The ending also has a nebulous, ethereal quality to it which left me feeling that I had missed something.

However, I was really engaged for much of it, and was interested in how these three main characters’ lives were interwoven. I found Russell to be the most interesting of the three, and yet his story seems secondary.

This is Hooper’s debut novel and I see promise here. I definitely would be willing to read another of her works.

I loved this one and was quite fond of James.