2017 reading challenge: a book involving travel

[baronessekat]

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book. I did it as an audio and I did like the narrator's voice. But I'm wondering if I might have liked this book better had I read it.

My problem was that it constantly flipped between the present and back to the 1940's and WWII, and at times I had trouble figuring out which time we were in when a new sub-chapter started.

Etta is 80 something, suffering from the beginning of Alzheimer's (though it never says the name directly) and has spent her whole life in a small rural town in Saskatchewan and wants to see the ocean before she dies. So she packs a bag and leaves a note for her husband telling him where she's gone to and that she will try to remember to come home. Otto is her husband, who had his adventure in his late teens when he went off to Europe to fight the war, so he lets her go and stays behind to learn to live on his own.

Russell is their friend, who has had a crush on Etta since they were teenagers, and is mad that Otto just let her wander off and goes off to find her.

James is a coyote that Etta meets along the way. Only I can't tell if he is real or a figment of her imagination.

The two storylines were good, but the ending kinda left me... eh with more questions than answers.

All in all, not sure I would recommend this book to my friends, but I am not left feeling that I wasted my time.



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