#emmahooper

Etta and Otto and Russel and James      |      by Emma Hooper

Words cannot describe how beautiful I found this book to be.  Even my tears as I read the last pages cannot tell you how touching I found this story.  I finished this book a couple months ago and I still think about it often.  It sticks with you. 

This is Emma Hooper’s debut novel and it is brilliant.  Some people praise her prose and her lack of quotation marks.  I love her prose, because it is simple and straightforward, yet has so much hidden beneath, much like her characters.  The lack of quotation marks...I am still deciding how I feel about that.  On one hand, it makes the pages looks less cluttered.  It makes you feel like you are peering in through a window and watching someone’s life happen, rather than reading about it.  On the other hand, quotation marks exist for a reason.

But THAT is not the main thing I want to discuss here about Etta and Otto and Russel and James.  I want to discuss every minutia of these characters lives.  I want to discuss their feelings and how that guided their life choices and did they ever talk to each other about this event or did it just sit there, brewing between them?  I want to talk about the details I missed and know every little thing that brought them from point A to point Z in their life.

I love Hooper’s juxtaposition of the past with the present.  I love the perspective it gives you.  I love the way you can juuuust a little bit see how one moment is shaping the characters’ choices fifty or sixty years later.  Or not.

Hooper simply lays the story out there with no manipulation telling you that you are supposed to feel one way or another.  You are an onlooker.  Free to form your own opinions or to simply observe.  She doesn’t take sides or ask the reader to do so either, she weaves a story full of depth and a long-lived life.

This book is simultaneously healing and heartbreaking.  It chills you to the bone with the reality of war at the same time it warms you with stories of love, understanding, and sacrifice.  It makes you question how we respond to those who hurt us while at the same time deepens your understanding of what it means to love someone beyond the romantic notion of the word.  It quiets you with the truths of Alzheimer's and old age, while it makes you shout for joy at the fullness of a life well lived to the very last breath.