Where Echoes Die: ARC Review

This week, a special review post! I received the ARC of Where Echoes Die by Courtney Gould through NetGalley. The premise sounded interesting, and the publisher in question also published Wake the Bones, which I really enjoyed.

Where Echoes Die is the story of Beck who has recently lost her mother to cancer. In the final years of her life, Ellery Birsching became obsessed with a town in Arizona called Backravel. This obsession destroyed her marriage, her career, and left Beck operating as the primary adult for the household, which included her little sister Riley. Now Beck has convinced her little sister to take one last journey to see the town their mother was so obsessed with. Riley thinks this is about giving Beck closure. Beck is looking to reconstruct her mother’s research and unravel the mystery of Backravel once and for all, even if it takes lying to her entire family to accomplish that.

Overall, this book wasn’t a bad one. It contained accurate depictions of grief and loss, and I would say that this is where the book shines. Without spoilers, the final scenes of the book were emotionally cathartic, and I really enjoyed the resolution that the author came up with. A satisfying conclusion goes a long way towards redeeming a book, and the ending is why I chose to review Where Echoes Die on the blog. While I wouldn’t say this book ever really scared me, I did think the exploration of how different people deal with loss and how that can drive us to do some awful things to one another was compelling.

However, I did feel like the pacing was just a little slow for me. As I mentioned, I was never really scared by the book. I felt that the book could have been a bit more weird, and had a bit more risk embedded in earlier scenes. Though Backravel was certainly unsettling, the town itself never felt malicious, which I think is really important to establishing a sense of risk. I wanted to question the goodness of the people in the town more, as I think this would have made the beginning of the book, where the pacing was slowest, a lot more compelling.

While I wasn’t really scared by the Backravel, I spent a good chunk of the book upset with Beck for lying to her sister even when it becomes obvious that Backravel is more dangerous than she thought it was. As an older sibling, I found it really hard to empathize with her decisions. I understood them, so this was not a characterization issue. It was more a product of my own personality not quite meshing with that of the character’s. It’s possible that if I had empathized a little bit better with Beck the pacing would not have dragged quite as much for me.

Read Where Echoes Die for teen themes of finding yourself, recovering from loss, sibling relationships, and complicated love. It’s got some weirdness in it, too. (YA, Science Fiction, Contemporary, Horror)