Published: January 15, 2019
Publisher: Page Street Publishing Co.
Series: Echo North #1
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 394 (Hardcover)
My Rating: 3 Stars
Synopsis:
Echo Alkaev’s safe and carefully structured world falls apart when her father leaves for the city and mysteriously disappears. Believing he is lost forever, Echo is shocked to find him half-frozen in the winter forest six months later, guarded by a strange talking wolf—the same creature who attacked her as a child. The wolf presents Echo with an ultimatum: If she lives with him for one year, he will ensure her father makes it home safely. But there is more to the wolf than Echo realizes.
In his enchanted house beneath a mountain, each room must be sewn together to keep the home from unraveling, and something new and dark and strange lies behind every door. When centuries-old secrets unfold, Echo discovers a magical library full of books-turned-mirrors, and a young man named Hal who is trapped inside of them. As the year ticks by, the rooms begin to disappear, and Echo must solve the mystery of the wolf’s enchantment before her time is up, otherwise Echo, the wolf, and Hal will be lost forever.
I love a good Beauty and the Beast retelling and in all honesty, this is probably one of the better ones I’ve read. I appreciate that it was of good quality and wasn’t a horrendously generic fantasy romance, but it pains me to say that I didn’t love it all that much either. I wanted to like it because it had so many things that I love in a story like this and I think some of that has to do with the format I chose (audiobook).
It starts off like many fairytales – a girl is treated poorly, this time by her stepmother, and it only grows worse when the girl’s father goes missing. She searches for him and eventually ends up in the forest, where she encounters a beast who makes a bargain with her – her father’s safe return home in exchange for a predetermined amount of time spent with the beast in his enchanted home. The enchanted house was one of my favorite parts of this story, with its vast array of mysterious rooms and the library that allows the reader to step into the story and live it out. Echo Alkaev, the main character, is rare in that she follows her captor’s strange rules… right up until the end. At this point the story started to lose me because we veer sharply away from the confines of the magical manor and Echo travels to the far northern reaches of the world searching out her Wolf. The sharp change just didn’t work all that well for me and while I could appreciate the magic and the setting in a clinical sort of way, I didn’t feel all that strongly about it and kind of wanted things to hurry up and end.
Overall, I think picking up the physical book version of this may have worked better for me than the audiobook format. The narrator did a great job, but I find that audiobooks tend to exaggerate the slowness of more sedately paced books. I think this was a good story with interesting characters and it was well written, but it wasn’t the book for me. If you’re a fan of more traditionally styled fairy tales then you would probably love this, especially if you’ve been searching for a Beauty and the Beast retelling that isn’t boiled down to the bare basics or cannibalized into a spicy romance plot.
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