"The Echo of Old Books"

The Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis

Pages: 431 Genre: historical fiction, romance

Rating: 2.5 Stars

Kindle Highlights

Hemi and Belle had a very dramatic break-up 40 years ago — or, at least, that's what Ashlyn realizes as she finds herself in possession of two authorless books: Regretting Belle and Forever, and Other Lies. Ashlyn is a used bookseller with a unique ability to feel the leftover emotions on books, and these two have strong residual feelings. Ashlyn becomes engrossed in solving the mystery of who these two people are and what happened so long ago that forced them apart. Meanwhile, she's forced to confront her own demons.

I try really hard to not give books 2.5/5 stars, because being exactly in the middle feels entirely unhelpful. But this book is exactly the type that I reserve it for: I mean it honestly when I was it was fine. Not great, not terrible. Just okay. I enjoyed reading it enough to power through most of it in two days, but I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone else either. It was just fine.

My biggest gripe is the length. It's entirely too long. The book should've been done at around 75%. There is a very disorienting shift in main character, which leads us to fully abandoning Ashlyn right at the end. She gets no real conclusion (unless you count a relationship solving all your problems as a good ending, in which case never mind — not a spoiler, I told you it's a romance). Despite being the main character with the titular magical power, Ashlyn actually does very little for the book as a whole, and the whole thing could've benefitted by fleshing out her story instead of using her as a convenient plot device to get the author to the story she clearly wanted to write.

When I say Ashlyn didn't do much, I mean it. The whole "echo" thing could've been written out entirely and the plot wouldn't have changed. It was the catalyst, sure, but no more of a catalyst than a used-book seller receiving beautifully bound books with no author, copywrite page, or publisher. The poor girl was really just an afterthought, which leads me to wonder why the author bothered including her at all. Hemi and Belle could've been its own standalone story, and it probably would've been a stronger narrative. I wish Davis would've shelved the idea of being able to feel the emotions behind used books and used it when that concept could've taken center stage.

Ashlyn is also just a little odd. She spends most of the book complaining about her mom abandoning her when in reality she just didn't want to pursue treatment for cancer. I understand why that would be hard for a child, but the way it's written (and continuously brought up) feels misogynistic.

Hemi and Belle were the stars of the show, which is unfortunate considering one of them is named "Hemi." It's short for Hemingway, but seriously? Hemi? As someone who considers herself to be proudly judgmental of names in literature, this was almost unforgivable.

Anyway! This book contains three stories: while we're primarily with Ashlyn in the 1980s, we're also reading both Hemi and Belle's individual accounts of their relationships from the '40s. I cannot express how badly I wish the book had just been a dual narrative of their relationship, because it would've improved the quality significantly for a couple of reasons.

First, the context of these books makes no sense. They're basically Dear John letters, but they're written in such a way that narratively recounts everything as if they're living it in the moment. Character and information is introduced in a way that doesn't make sense considering they both lived the same experiences and would know references to people and events throughout the whole thing. It was purely written for our benefit, which totally breaks the immersion and makes the concept just a little bit too silly.

Second, their story was actually interesting. At a certain point it did seem like we were just dumping in trauma to add excitement, but, for the most part, I thought it was an engaging romance set around the tensions of WWII, American Nazi sympathizers, and the public perception of fascism and war at the time. I can't speak to how accurate it was, but I liked reading it. I didn't know that was the angle the book was going to end up taking, and it was a pleasant surprise. However, similar to Ashlyn and her Echos, all of this is totally dropped in the end.

As it was, Hemi and Belle just weren't written well enough to make me root for them. Their entire relationship was predictable, their voices were too much the same to connect with either one, and they were always flip-flopping on their feelings towards the other in a way that made the whole thing a little bit annoying. Also, the ending of their books really did not warrant all that suspense.

Maybe this is unfair to say, but this book never should've been a romance. By pigeonholing the story into that genre, we lost out on the chance to actually explore the characters and give them satisfying endings. Sometimes a story shouldn't end in a happy ending, and this is one of those books. If we had been allowed to end the story less-than-perfectly, there would've been more room to flesh out the characters and storylines that were set up. Unfortunately, though, that's not what happened. Instead we ended up with a romance book where characters did nothing and did not behave like normal people, thus giving us an entirely underwhelming ending for an otherwise entertaining premise.

I do want to say that this was beautifully written, though. It was very poetic in a way that mostly worked. It came off a little bit pretentious at the beginning, but once I got used to it I actually really enjoyed the style.

I know this all sounds very critical, but I really didn't mind the book that much while I was reading it. By the ending, I was just disappointed.