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twinkletues's review
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content, Pregnancy, Emotional abuse, and Murder
Moderate: Toxic relationship and Grief
Minor: Child abuse, Suicide, and Alcohol
taylor13's review
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Murder, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Sexual violence, Sexual assault, Misogyny, Vomit, Violence, Toxic relationship, Suicide attempt, Suicide, Suicidal thoughts, Pregnancy, Gore, Death, Medical content, Injury/Injury detail, Infidelity, Grief, and Death of parent
directorpurry's review
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content, Murder, and Body horror
Moderate: Suicide, Infidelity, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Pregnancy, and Child abuse
karenmsecrest's review
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Murder, and Pregnancy
Moderate: Suicide
panikos's review
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
The premise of The Echo Wife is just up my street, but the execution didn't quite hit the spot for me. Everything about it is passable. The prose is passable, though it often feels repetitive and a little cliched. The plot is passable, but feels cobbled-together in places. The characters are passable, but not as complex as they're trying to be.
The novel just has a somewhat unfinished feel. If you asked me to say what the themes of this book are, I think I'd actually struggle to articulate them. It's about self-hatred, definitely. It's about male violence and how men take away women's personhood. The themes are there, but I don't feel like the novel actually does much with them. Especially towards the end of the book, it seemed like the author was grappling around for a point - any point - but never quite found it.
The middle portion of the plot is interesting, but it does often feel like the world of the novel is simplified to allow the story to progress unhindered.When Evelyn and Martine decided to grow a clone to replace Nathan, I thought that was a great turn in the narrative, a clever way to weave the speculative elements into the main conflict. However, it's very strange to me that nobody goes asking after Nathan in those intervening 3 months where they had to make the clone. Yes, they said he'd gone on a trip to the mountains, but how convincing would that really be? Where's the evidence to support it? I would've liked to see them doing more to maintain the lie outside of needing to make the clone. I never really felt that there was any threat of discovery, which drained the tension a lot. There were no police, no people asking after Nathan, no family members or friends or colleagues demanding answers. I know that Nathan was supposed to be pretty unnattached, but it felt weak. And it made the whole process of replacing him with a clone feel far, far too easy.
The ending also felt quite anticlimactic to me, and was definitely the point in the novel where the themes became the most confused.The novel dedicates so much time to telling us that Nathan is a dreadful, controlling person. Yet the would-be twist in the final quarter of the novel is that...Nathan is an awful person. The moment where Martine finds the bodies of the old clones is clearly supposed to be hard-hitting, but it didn't really resonate with me, because it just felt like more of the same. I already knew that Nathan was terrible. And it seemed fairly obvious to me that Martine couldn't have been his first attempt at creating a clone of his wife. As with so much about the rest of the book, the logic also felt flawed; I couldn't understand why Nathan would bury so many failed clones in his garden, rather than burning them in the lab like standard. With Laila, perhaps it made sense, because he had likely brought her home first. But the others, which had fundamental defects with their growth and bodies - why would you take them all the way to the house to dispose of them?
Another thing the novel doesn't really manage to reconcile is that Evelyn, at least when it comes to how she treats clones, is no better than Nathan. We're supposed to see Nathan as twisted for creating clones and destroying them when they don't suit his purposes, but Evelyn does the same thing every single day, and she's still doing it by the end of the novel. She has come to see Martine as a person, but there's no real movement on how she sees clones as a whole - she's studying Martine to see how she bucked her programming, presumably because she wants to stop it happening again. She never comes to meaningfully question the morality and legitimacy of her own research, despite the fact that it's what made Nathan's actions possible. That felt like a massive missed opportunity to me, considering how theme of ethics permeated the book as a whole.
All in all, The Echo Wife did not live up to what I hoped it would be, but I still somewhat enjoyed it. I think the premise and concept are stellar on paper, but other stories have done a much better job at dissecting what it means to be able to clone and replace people, and what it means to come face to face with another version of yourself.
The novel just has a somewhat unfinished feel. If you asked me to say what the themes of this book are, I think I'd actually struggle to articulate them. It's about self-hatred, definitely. It's about male violence and how men take away women's personhood. The themes are there, but I don't feel like the novel actually does much with them. Especially towards the end of the book, it seemed like the author was grappling around for a point - any point - but never quite found it.
The middle portion of the plot is interesting, but it does often feel like the world of the novel is simplified to allow the story to progress unhindered.
The ending also felt quite anticlimactic to me, and was definitely the point in the novel where the themes became the most confused.
Another thing the novel doesn't really manage to reconcile is that Evelyn, at least when it comes to how she treats clones, is no better than Nathan. We're supposed to see Nathan as twisted for creating clones and destroying them when they don't suit his purposes, but Evelyn does the same thing every single day, and she's still doing it by the end of the novel. She has come to see Martine as a person, but there's no real movement on how she sees clones as a whole - she's studying Martine to see how she bucked her programming, presumably because she wants to stop it happening again. She never comes to meaningfully question the morality and legitimacy of her own research, despite the fact that it's what made Nathan's actions possible. That felt like a massive missed opportunity to me, considering how theme of ethics permeated the book as a whole.
All in all, The Echo Wife did not live up to what I hoped it would be, but I still somewhat enjoyed it. I think the premise and concept are stellar on paper, but other stories have done a much better job at dissecting what it means to be able to clone and replace people, and what it means to come face to face with another version of yourself.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Suicide, and Violence
nyoom's review
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
0.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abortion, Adult/minor relationship, Alcohol, Emotional abuse, Gore, Medical trauma, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Self harm, Trafficking, Blood, Body horror, Bullying, Child abuse, Confinement, Death, Death of parent, Drug use, Grief, Incest, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide, Violence, Ableism, Alcoholism, Child death, Domestic abuse, Gaslighting, Infidelity, Medical content, Mental illness, Misogyny, Murder, Panic attacks/disorders, Pregnancy, Racism, Sexism, Toxic friendship, Toxic relationship, and Vomit
Moderate: Abandonment, Car accident, Cursing, Fire/Fire injury, Infertility, Racial slurs, and Terminal illness
Minor: Sexual content
valent1ne's review
3.25
Complicated feelings abt this one. While I liked it somewhat + found it interesting, it was not by any means what I would call good. It ended with many unanswered questions, the pacing was strange, the main character wallowed in self loathing and pity the entire story, and there was A Lot of backstory that tied in only vaguely and overall contributed very little to the book itself.
The thing that bugged me most was the plot tho, or the lack of it. There were Things That Happened, all dutifully caused by one event or another, going on and on in a way that made sense. There were lots of Things That Happened As Results Of Other Things, lots of Small In-Between Goals, but there wasn’t any overarching plot at all. There was no Big Final Goal or Thing To Do before the story ended, they just wandered from one problem to the next until the author decided to end it. (Also, the fact that the main character was a clone, and this was almost never relevant except when the author wanted to point out that This Isn’t Something That’s Possible for a clone - except for this one it is 💕 This was not ever explained.)
Anyway !! This sounds overwhelmingly negative, but I did actually enjoy this book, though it got sad at the end. It was interesting and it held my attention, but it just wasn’t well written.
The thing that bugged me most was the plot tho, or the lack of it. There were Things That Happened, all dutifully caused by one event or another, going on and on in a way that made sense. There were lots of Things That Happened As Results Of Other Things, lots of Small In-Between Goals, but there wasn’t any overarching plot at all. There was no Big Final Goal or Thing To Do before the story ended, they just wandered from one problem to the next until the author decided to end it. (Also, the fact that the main character was a clone, and this was almost never relevant except when the author wanted to point out that This Isn’t Something That’s Possible for a clone - except for this one it is 💕 This was not ever explained.)
Anyway !! This sounds overwhelmingly negative, but I did actually enjoy this book, though it got sad at the end. It was interesting and it held my attention, but it just wasn’t well written.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Infidelity, Medical content, Murder, and Physical abuse
Moderate: Misogyny, Pregnancy, and Suicide
kt2e56's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
I’m speechless. Oh my GOD, this was so good. The sci-fi and mystery angle is interesting in and of itself, but what really pulled me in was the ethics of cloning interwoven throughout. I think it’s because I’m a survivor myself, but I really related to a lot of this book and my heart ached quite a bit for Evelyn who was replaced for not being perfect for her husband and of course Martine who was groomed and molded based on the whims of a deeply fucked up individual.
The parts where Martine can’t figure out what *she* wants versus what she was created to want were really just so chilling. Reading the acknowledgements at the end and discovering that the author is also a survivor helped process a lot of this for me and my instincts about why certain aspects of this book crawled under my skin.
Definitely give this one a read if you can.
The parts where Martine can’t figure out what *she* wants versus what she was created to want were really just so chilling. Reading the acknowledgements at the end and discovering that the author is also a survivor helped process a lot of this for me and my instincts about why certain aspects of this book crawled under my skin.
Definitely give this one a read if you can.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Infidelity, Medical content, Murder, Body horror, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Sexual violence, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Pregnancy, Suicide, and Sexual content
Deals a lot with grooming but of an adult who is abookinthebath's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Violence, Murder, and Child abuse
readingtotravel's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
There are honestly no words. Such a great psychological thriller/sci-fi narrative that keeps you guessing until the end. I will say that I am surprised out how the end played out. Like all of that suspense and drama built up for a semi-peaceful yet eerie ending. I felt like we were being built up for a battle between Martine and Evelyn. Or a bigger moment with Nathan.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder and Suicide