Review by New York Times Review
Hooper (who also performs as the solo musical act Waitress for the Bees) has more or less nailed the "Amélie" charm with this sweet, disarming story of lasting love. Eighty-three-year-old Etta Kinnick, a former schoolteacher, leaves her Saskatchewan farmhouse early one morning, intent on walking to the Atlantic Ocean, some 2,000 miles away. Her memory may be failing, but she knows she has always wanted to see "the water." When he wakes, her husband, Otto, finds a goodbye note and a stack of cards with useful recipes. "I will try to remember to come back," she has written. On her way, Etta passes her neighbor Russell's house. Though Otto can endure Etta's pilgrimage, taking up hobbies, writing letters he knows she may never receive and calming himself with her injunction not to worry, her old beau Russell cannot. An experienced tracker, he sets off in search of her. "Etta and Otto and Russell and James" slips between the present and the past, piecing together the three main characters' childhoods and the romance between Etta and Otto sparked by their wartime letters. (The James of the title is a companion coyote Etta acquires along the way.) Here and there, we get a beguiling glimpse of the other lives Etta and the men who love her might have led. But is she only Etta? Are her memories hers alone? Where are the real borders of the self? "That night she slept in a mustard field and dreamt. She dreamt of water. And boats and boys and men and boys, breathing in the water, spitting out the water, and everything loud and so much color, but darkened and getting darker and this is no place for a woman you better get down But I am not a woman, she reassured herself, but I am strong and surviving." Hooper shows great restraint in balancing the quirky with the universal, blurring the lines between them. This may be the best novel to meaningfully feature windblown dust. Hooper's steady hand creates the perfect setup for the unexpected. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens: A man and a woman are one. Two men, a woman and a coyote are one. REGINA MARLER is writing a biography of Virginia Woolf.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 1, 2015]
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Eighty-three-year-old Etta embarks on a 3,200-kilometer journey walking from Saskatchewan to Halifax in order to see the ocean for the first time. Along the way, she befriends a talking coyote named James, a reporter who decides she'd rather walk with Etta than report, and throngs of fans who follow her progress from town to town. Her husband, Otto, passes the time until her return by writing Etta letters he never mails, learning to bake from her ancient recipe cards, and creating papier-mache animal sculptures. Russell, who lives on the neighboring farm, goes after Etta, and, in the process, decides that it's time to begin his own journey. Each character carries heavy memories: tragic pregnancies, the horrors of World War II, a broken heart, an injured limb. And over all, the dust of drought settles, the lack of water a constant pall, the search for water a means of redemption. VERDICT Debut novelist Hooper's spare, evocative prose dips in and out of reality and travels between past and present creating what Etta tells Otto is "just a long loop." This is a quietly powerful story whose dreamlike quality lingers long after the last page is turned. For literary fiction fans. [See Prepub Alert, 4/14/14.]-Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
