You can follow his writing via his blog 'The Musings and Artful Blunders of Scott D. Scott Southard is the author of the new novel 'Permanent Spring Showers' and 'A Jane Austen Daydream'. So set aside the dirty dishes and the pile of bills and just savor this book, if only for a moment. This book deserves something more: your time. This is not a book to skim over a weekend or add to a pile of books being read at the same time. 'Etta and Otto and Russell and James' is a stunning debut. There is a song under this tale, a soft hum, and it resides not just in the words but the spaces between them. A single page might only have two sentences, but really you wouldn’t need a word more.

Grammar seems to bend at her whim with descriptions blending into quotations as quotation marks would only get in the way for her prose.

She isn’t confined to what I would consider the rules of writing. And I can’t help but feel her musical background influences the style of her prose in this book. The novel also tells us the story of Otto’s time fighting in a war, their friend and neighbor Russell who spends his life waiting too, be it for Etta or the deer in his yard, and James, a coyote who just might be more than a coyote.Įmma Hooper isn’t just a writer of lovely stories, she’s also a musician. The novel follows Etta’s journey, which sparks the interest of the public after a newspaper photographer captures an image of her, but also returns to Otto as he passes his time waiting for her. She doesn’t take much with her, just a few odds and ends and a note reminding her of who she is, since she suffers from the early stages of dementia. She’s left only a message saying that she is off to see the ocean and she is traveling those 3,232 kilometers by foot. Otto wakes up one day to find that Etta is gone. In her debut novel, Hooper introduces us to Etta and Otto, an old married couple in Canada. 'Etta and Otto and Russell and James' by Emma Hooper did just that for me. And so, it is almost a shock when an author emerges from the masses with something that makes you look up from your day-to-day stresses and take notice.

It can be argued (and it has been) that there are more authors than readers. The publishing world is a congested market. Hours and days slip by one after another with little thought or memory attached to them.If we are fortunate a moment arrives from time to time that makes you take a breath, pause, look around around the world and feel lucky. We go from day to day lost in worries about jobs, family, and the future. Sadly, we usually forget that fact in the mundanity of it. Life is a wondrous bit of magical happenstance.

Etta and otto