Etna is a story about continuing on when everything you have known and loved is lost and gone forever. We follow Etna as he strives towards the coast where he was a puppy before enduring the harsh realities of being a working dog in a devastating war that ravaged his country. The land is forever changed, and other animals are now a rare sight. Most notably, there is an absence of birds in the country. The missing birds bring into sharp focus the lack of peace and the total disruption to a way of life. Nothing will ever be the same. All Etna has left is a memory of that coastal place where he once had a mother and siblings, and he clings to the possibility of a future in the last place he knew safety and happiness in the past. The novel ends with the hopeful message that we can endure terrible things and yet, in the ruins, there is always new life waiting for us if we are strong enough to accept what has occurred and move forward with a sense of hope for the future, even if that new life is a different life, a stranger to us. With time, a strange life, like a stranger, can become as familiar to us and as much our home as that echo of the past.
Etna by Paul Yoon, (List Price: $28, Scribner, 9781668020821, August 2026)
Reviewed by Savannah, The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, NC