"Nelly, the protagonist in Julia Park Tracey's new novel, "Whoa, Nelly! A Love Story (with Footnotes)," is a single librarian in her 40s living in a small Northern California town whose only real friends are her two cats that she sleeps with. She, like Tracey herself, is also eternally fascinated by the "Little House on the Prairie" series of children's books by Laura Ingalls Wilder."
""Nobody wanted it. It was too weird. Fiction doesn't have footnotes," says Tracey, who says the device is a way to break up Nelly's narration and talk directly to the reader. "Nelly is a know-it-all librarian, so she knows everything. So it's her breaking her stream of consciousness," she said in comparing the technique to that used in the 1970s "Ellery Queen" TV series in which the lead character would "break the fourth wall" to address the audience"
Nelly is a single, fortysomething librarian in a small Northern California town whose closest companions are two cats. She is obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books and, after losing her library job to budget cuts, takes a train to De Smet, South Dakota to explore Wilder's legacy. The prairie proves less romantic than imagined. Nelly falls in love for the first time and returns determined to confront her overbearing mother. The narrative uses frequent footnotes to interrupt narration, address the reader directly, and create a participatory, fourth-wall-breaking experience; publishers initially considered the device too unconventional.
Read at The Mercury News
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