The Happy Burden of Family

A friend of mine—one of the most sensitive, intelligent, well-read people I know—once told me that he had never been able to get past the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It begins with Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad, remembering the distant morning when his father took him to discover ice. There was something about that opening line—a cuteness about “discovering ice,” perhaps, a contrived quality?—that irritated him so profoundly that he threw the book across the room and never continued. He missed out, of course. Gabriel García Márquez’s panoramic vision and mythical force make his 1967 novel one of the great literary experiences of the 20th century. But the style is not for everybody, and I can imagine Emma Hooper’s debut novel, Etta and Otto and Russell and James, with its 83-year-old heroine walking across Canada to discover the ocean with a talking coyote named James, making a dent in my friend’s...