In a nutshell: Please please please DO READ this wonderful story about Etta, her husband Otto, and Otto’s best friend and brother-of choice Russell, and, yes and, James – about whom only those who read the book should be allowed to learn more.

And more, trying to avoid spoiling:
Actually, it proved hard for me to write enough about this gem to lure potential readers into reading it – but to not spoil too much about its content, best, nothing at all beyond what is obvious from its title or the very first pages.

With this book, its charm is very much also just how the author manages to reveal more and more about the common history of its protagonists: how Russell came to more or less live with Otto’s numerous family despite of being the neighbors’ nephew, how many of the farmers’ children take turns at attending school, how Etta gets to that school, how the war cuts into their lives.

“I will try to remember to come back.” P. 1
If other husbands received that line they would be well aware their wife was very very angry and it would be just sarcastically. Etta means it – she loses her memory and all of their memories together. She is now 83, first thing in the morning she looks at a piece of paper with her age, name/dates for parents, sister, nephew, and husband on it – to not forget while she is walking on.

Author Emma Hooper miraculously manages to make the story evolve around the starting point in the present, when Etta embarks on her journey, at the age of 83, to finally go to the sea for the first time in her life.

The progress within the book is steady, calm, patient – you may be present while Otto, on his own, learns how to bake from Etta’s recipe cards, or follow Etta gaining experience in fishing. Some of the events are tragical, although born with stoicism; many funny, and born with just the very same attitude. The story is about love and friendship and loss and imagination and old age and dreams, it is as much a lovestory as it is a story about the war. It celebrates endurance as it does the idea to start again, fulfil your dreams. As much as the story realistically describes the hardship of farm living in pre-WWII Saskatchewan, Canada, it also has tendencies of a modern fairy tale: Some of it is mythical, magical – and leaves a lot of space for imagination and interpretation.

The author’s style is specific:
She does not use quotation marks for direct speech - to make sure the reader knows that the speaker changed, the author uses a new line – so it is easy to read this after having gotten used to it.
“Before they left, the woman whispered to Etta, while the man was looking away, scribbling, I wish I could come with you.
You can, said Etta.
I can’t, said the woman.” P. 94

The books consists of rather unusually small chapters, sometimes less than a page, even just one sentence at times, maybe three pages, with changing timeline and subject. They change in between now, with Etta and Otto and Russell old and Etta leaving; and their past, starting onward from childhood.

Some of the paragraphs kind of vary a topic like the different way any encounter Etta has on her trip might end up for her or how the content of a letter written might be – this does have an impact while you are reading it because it quite forces you into dwelling into these and many more options.

You will find pretty short sentences – and some that seemingly never end at all. You will…
Well, you will anyway only find out if you read it for yourself. Please do so.