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Donna asked this question about Etta and Otto and Russell and James:
I had to reread the ending a couple times and I'm still a little confused. Did Otto die and appear as a vision to Etta in the water? I was beginning to suspect that Otto never made it back from the war and that he died in the fight on the beach and Etta went to the water to see him. I hate to feel stupid when I read a book, but that what happened here. Can someone enlighten me?
Deb I just finished and was wondering the same thing...Found this in an interview with the author,
"The sense of an ending

As the novel goes on, the past an…moreI just finished and was wondering the same thing...Found this in an interview with the author,
"The sense of an ending

As the novel goes on, the past and the present—and what is real and what is imagined—all start to blur.

“I wanted it to be non-linear and a little bit confusing at times. But you don’t want to turn people off and you don’t want to be self-indulgent, so striking the right balance took a little bit of back and forth.”

I found the ending of the novel to be ambiguous, which Hooper is delighted to hear. “I had a meeting with Juliet [Annan, her editor] and the publicists last week— and they were like: ‘So, we all disagree on what happens at the end . . .’”

This is exactly the result Hooper was aiming for. “Within my academic life, I’m very into the ‘death of the author’, what that did to art and what it continues to do. I really like the idea that people can come up with really strong opinions as to what happened and it really doesn’t matter what I think. So it’s definitely, deliberately ‘choose your own adventure’ there at the end,” she says.

So did Penguin ask for a clearer resolution? “Not as my publishers, I think just as human beings. People want to know if they are right or not. And most people don’t have the chance to ask the author.”

Her parting wish, before she catches the train back to Bath, is for readers of Etta and Otto and Russell and James to “trust the conclusion that they draw”.
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Etta and Otto and Russell and James
by Emma Hooper (Goodreads Author)
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