"Nobody wanted it. It was too weird. Fiction doesn't have footnotes,"
"Nelly is a know-it-all librarian, so she knows everything. So it's her breaking her stream of consciousness,"
"the reader becomes a participant because they're being addressed directly by the main character,"
Nelly is a single librarian in her 40s living in a small Northern California town whose only close companions are two cats. Losing her library job to budget cuts prompts a train trip to De Smet, South Dakota, to explore Laura Ingalls Wilder's legacy. Life on the prairie proves less romantic than imagined. Nelly falls in love for the first time and returns ready to confront her overbearing mother. The narrative uses footnotes to break up Nelly's narration and address the reader directly. Publishers initially rejected the book as too weird for using footnotes, and the device is likened to Ellery Queen's fourth-wall breaks to invite reader participation.
Read at The Mercury News
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