Echoes by Alice Reeds — Review

Summary:

They wake on a deserted island. Fiona and Miles, high school enemies now stranded together. No memory of how they got there. No plan to follow, no hope to hold on to.

Each step forward reveals the mystery behind the forces that brought them here. And soon, the most chilling discovery: something else is on the island with them.

Something that won’t let them leave alive.

 

Review: 3 stars

I requested a copy of this novel purely on reputation. A few blogger friends of mine said that this was supposed to be good and I trust their opinions, so I requested a review copy. I never read the blub, so I was in for a wild ride. Echoes is a young adult novel about survival with a bit of a science fiction twist. It was pretty good and kept me reading because I was so curious about what would happen next. The characters were mediocre in my opinion. They were your run of the mill young adult male and female characters. They didn’t feel like anything special. They weren’t badly written or anything, they were just ordinary and a bit boring. By themselves they didn’t stand out, but that was okay. This happens in a lot of young adult books, and if the plot and rest of the book is really good, a lot of time no one notices. The plot was pretty interesting and really is what kept me reading. There were two alternating realities, one where Miles and Fiona were stranded on an island. That was the reality that I found most interesting. It felt similar to Cast Away at some times. In both that movie and this book people were trying to survive on an abandoned island that they had crash landed on. Cast Away is one of my favorite movies, partly because I love survival stories. I find it interesting trying to make it in the wild all alone and Miles and Fiona had to work to survive. In the other reality, Miles and Fiona are stuck in Berlin where they were supposed to have a summer internship. The connection between the two realities and the plot where someone was after them kept me guessing. I felt curious and had questions that kept me reading throughout the whole book. But unfortunately some of those questions never got answered, the ending leaves you hanging without wrapping up some pretty important plot points. The writing was more tell than show in some parts. For example, I was told about how Fiona’s relationship with her father affected how she acted with male authority figures rather than shown that through her behavior and her actions. I think this was part of the reason that I never felt emotionally connected to the characters or the story. A lot of big moments fell flat and no matter what the characters went through it felt like it was conveyed in the same tone. The writing wasn’t bad, it just failed to grip me emotionally. The pacing was kind of slow, but the writing was good enough and the plot interesting enough that I kept reading. I expected it to be a lot better than it was though. I think that since I never felt emotionally connected to the characters it made the novel fall flat for me. It was okay, but it really wasn’t anything special, I could take it or leave it. The ending was really disappointing though, I expected a lot of things to be explained and was left without some necessary explanations. It wasn’t even a cliff hanger, rather than an unfinished story.