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chantelmccray's review against another edition
4.0
I feel so fortunate this novel came my way. I enjoyed it so much more than I anticipated. A multi-layered, elegantly written story of broken souls finding their way back home. A driving plot that will pull you in from the very first page and be impossible to put down until the last. Fascinating characters that will haunt you well after you finish reading the novel. Echolocation is one of only four titles that Engine Books publishes per year, so it may not be at your local bookstore, but the leg work it takes to seek it out will be well worth the effort.
drbird's review against another edition
4.0
ECHOLOCATION by Myfanwy Collins has me thinking about fission. At first I thought of the collapsing of the universe, but, without giving away too many spoilers, this is more about the collision of distinct, related women and the resulting release of energy. There is destruction and creation in the series of events. Examples of gain from loss begin in the opening pages when Geneva (the main character and the most morally compelling) loses her arm but gains freedom.
I think the greatest momentum in the novel is created by the consistent PRESENCE of the PAST. This particular aspect of the novel reminds me of Alice Munro, whose characters seem like mental time travelers, moving between now and then. Collins juggles Renee, Cheri, and Geneva and I'm curious what she'd be able to do with just one character put under the microscope of her sentences.
The closing ~30 pages is quite interesting as it reveals more memories than I expected from the climax of the novel, cementing Geneva as the emotional core of the novel, the potentially tragic figure, and the one who still lingers after I've shut the book.
I think the greatest momentum in the novel is created by the consistent PRESENCE of the PAST. This particular aspect of the novel reminds me of Alice Munro, whose characters seem like mental time travelers, moving between now and then. Collins juggles Renee, Cheri, and Geneva and I'm curious what she'd be able to do with just one character put under the microscope of her sentences.
The closing ~30 pages is quite interesting as it reveals more memories than I expected from the climax of the novel, cementing Geneva as the emotional core of the novel, the potentially tragic figure, and the one who still lingers after I've shut the book.
darren_cormier's review against another edition
5.0
Myfanwy Collins’ absorbing debut novel Echolocation is on its surface a book about family connections, and our perpetual yearning for and trying to create home. But it’s also about the perpetual damage family dynamics and our pasts have on us, and how those same dynamics simultaneously contain the keys to renewal. Although the book reads fast, (I read it over the course of two days on my subway commute) the emotional impact and depths of the characters stick with you for weeks after you thought you were finished.
Cheri and Geneva are almost sisters who were raised by Cheri’s aunt Marie: Geneva was taken in by Marie as a foster child at a young age. Cheri was raised by her aunt as her mother, Renee, didn’t feel she was fit to raise her properly, and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a child. When Aunt Marie dies, she leaves the gas station and country store in the rural Adirondack town along the Canadian border to both the women.
The book opens with Geneva losing her arm through an accident when chopping a tree with a chainsaw. This serves as a metaphor for the phantom (emotional) pain she feels as having never been a full part of the family. When she was adopted by Aunt Marie, Renee had not fully left town for Florida yet; she would return occasionally to shower Cheri with gifts and empty promises, enough to build Cheri’s hopes up about her mother staying around, only to dash them when she inevitably leaves. It is this emotional yoyo-ing of Renee that leads Geneva to loathe her adopted sister’s biological mother. If Renee (and here I agree) made the painful decision to abandon her daughter, it would be more beneficial to fully abandon Cheri without the emotional damage. To continually toy with her daughter’s emotions (even if is inadvertent) amounts to an unintentional cruelty.
Shortly after Aunt Marie passes away, Cheri returns from New York City, where she hoped to find herself and return a big success as a means of revenge against her taunting classmates and townspeople. Instead she became an alcoholic and partygoer, like the path Renee ending up going down. Renee also returns to the town, unknowing that her sister has passed away, with an intention of ridding herself of her lifetime guilt from abandonment in a way that proves destructive and redemptive to all involved.
Collins cares enough about her characters to show their humanity and desperation, even through some of their reprehensible actions, especially Renee’s boyfriend Rick. Its Collins’ humanity that allows us to see Rick as the damaged human he is, a product of his own emotionally abusive past. Another indication of how our past is constantly informing our presents.
I won’t get into the violent denouement for fear of spoiling this for any readers, but not a note in this book rings false. We end up caring for all the subjects, or at the least feeling empathy for them.
This less malevolent eco-noir cousin to Winter’s Bone shows that sometimes those who caused the most pain are the only ones who can repair it. And that home isn’t necessarily a physical location, but a personal and emotional acceptance.
Cheri and Geneva are almost sisters who were raised by Cheri’s aunt Marie: Geneva was taken in by Marie as a foster child at a young age. Cheri was raised by her aunt as her mother, Renee, didn’t feel she was fit to raise her properly, and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a child. When Aunt Marie dies, she leaves the gas station and country store in the rural Adirondack town along the Canadian border to both the women.
The book opens with Geneva losing her arm through an accident when chopping a tree with a chainsaw. This serves as a metaphor for the phantom (emotional) pain she feels as having never been a full part of the family. When she was adopted by Aunt Marie, Renee had not fully left town for Florida yet; she would return occasionally to shower Cheri with gifts and empty promises, enough to build Cheri’s hopes up about her mother staying around, only to dash them when she inevitably leaves. It is this emotional yoyo-ing of Renee that leads Geneva to loathe her adopted sister’s biological mother. If Renee (and here I agree) made the painful decision to abandon her daughter, it would be more beneficial to fully abandon Cheri without the emotional damage. To continually toy with her daughter’s emotions (even if is inadvertent) amounts to an unintentional cruelty.
Shortly after Aunt Marie passes away, Cheri returns from New York City, where she hoped to find herself and return a big success as a means of revenge against her taunting classmates and townspeople. Instead she became an alcoholic and partygoer, like the path Renee ending up going down. Renee also returns to the town, unknowing that her sister has passed away, with an intention of ridding herself of her lifetime guilt from abandonment in a way that proves destructive and redemptive to all involved.
Collins cares enough about her characters to show their humanity and desperation, even through some of their reprehensible actions, especially Renee’s boyfriend Rick. Its Collins’ humanity that allows us to see Rick as the damaged human he is, a product of his own emotionally abusive past. Another indication of how our past is constantly informing our presents.
I won’t get into the violent denouement for fear of spoiling this for any readers, but not a note in this book rings false. We end up caring for all the subjects, or at the least feeling empathy for them.
This less malevolent eco-noir cousin to Winter’s Bone shows that sometimes those who caused the most pain are the only ones who can repair it. And that home isn’t necessarily a physical location, but a personal and emotional acceptance.
kfan's review against another edition
5.0
So, OK. This was not at all the book I was expecting it to be. And I love to be surprised, so I mean that as the highest complement.
What you gather from the back cover and the first couple of chapters is that this is a book about a complicated family dynamic. Two sort-of sisters with a lot of distance between them (Cheri & Geneva) come back together when Aunt Marie, the woman who raised them, dies. And as if they didn't have enough problems of their own, Cheri's absentee mother Renee then comes flying back towards them with secrets and problems of her own.
Given all that I was expecting a novel about these three women struggling and learning to love and forgive and accept each other after a lot of hurt and a lot of distance. Which, I mean, sounds like a good book! Kind of Oprah-ish, but good.
But this is soooo not an Oprah book. Myf's prose is really quiet and lovely and full of these small beautiful moments. But the story is not quiet and lovely. It is dark and violent and scary. THINGS HAPPEN and keep happening and it all unfolds shockingly quick, like an arm being torn off by a chainsaw.
Like the title suggests, it is about people trying to find their way in the darkness. Hurtling towards walls that they might not see in time to steer clear of, but not letting that knowledge slow them down.
Saying much more would give too much away, but it's not a book that hands things over tidily. It is true to life and true to its characters. Families can be messy and complicated because lives are messy and complicated, and this book doesn't sugercoat it or pat it down. It really stuck with me, I was chewing over the ending for the rest of the day, so "haunting" seems like the right word for it. Loved it.
What you gather from the back cover and the first couple of chapters is that this is a book about a complicated family dynamic. Two sort-of sisters with a lot of distance between them (Cheri & Geneva) come back together when Aunt Marie, the woman who raised them, dies. And as if they didn't have enough problems of their own, Cheri's absentee mother Renee then comes flying back towards them with secrets and problems of her own.
Given all that I was expecting a novel about these three women struggling and learning to love and forgive and accept each other after a lot of hurt and a lot of distance. Which, I mean, sounds like a good book! Kind of Oprah-ish, but good.
But this is soooo not an Oprah book. Myf's prose is really quiet and lovely and full of these small beautiful moments. But the story is not quiet and lovely. It is dark and violent and scary. THINGS HAPPEN and keep happening and it all unfolds shockingly quick, like an arm being torn off by a chainsaw.
Like the title suggests, it is about people trying to find their way in the darkness. Hurtling towards walls that they might not see in time to steer clear of, but not letting that knowledge slow them down.
Saying much more would give too much away, but it's not a book that hands things over tidily. It is true to life and true to its characters. Families can be messy and complicated because lives are messy and complicated, and this book doesn't sugercoat it or pat it down. It really stuck with me, I was chewing over the ending for the rest of the day, so "haunting" seems like the right word for it. Loved it.
shimmer's review against another edition
5.0
As a number of other reviewers have said, Myfanwy Collins’ Echolocation is a novel that confounds expectations. Two almost-sisters are brought home to a small, isolated town in northern New York by the impending death of their almost-mother, whose own half-sister also returns years after walking out on her family. So it’s a family story, about generations of women and their hard feelings, but not really, or rather not only.
The novel opens with one of the sisters, Geneva, cutting trees for firewood:
Geneva regrets the felling even as she performs it, because “It felt like a betrayal, this taking of saw to tree.” And in an act of fate if not fatality, the chainsaw slips and she loses an arm. This marks Geneva, not only in the obvious way but because the aftermath of this act in which she thought only of short-term gains (sacrificing long term potential for cash in hand) is an awareness of consequences and an ability to conceive of the future, something every other character in the novel seems to lack. She’s able to cast a cold eye on the past, while others nurse old hurts and cling to hazy recollections of who someone was a long time ago instead of noticing who they are now.
Other characters sleep with strangers, commit crimes, run out on each other, and generally fall victim to their own lack of forethought and vision. They’re focused on instant gratification, while Geneva aims to protect what she has, even when that protection turns violent. And Echolocation does get violent, very much so: what starts in the guise of a family saga enters country noir territory quickly, and brutally. So quickly, in fact, that as two characters set off on parallel courses to an inevitably showdown, I thought, “Already? If the big tension is happening now, how will it be sustained?” I was made suddenly aware, as a reader, of my own looking forward: I saw the amount of book left, the distance in pages, and it played against expectation with what felt like a third act escalation coming so soon.
Those dual tensions, from the plot itself and from my own thwarted assumptions, kept me both engrossed in the story and wondering, in the back of my mind, what Collins was going to do with all this. And what she did was impressive: ultimately, Echolocation goes where so few stories that build toward violence have the vision or courage to go: all the way to the aftermath. This isn’t a stories that winds up as soon as the clash has occurred, in which characters presumably settle back into routine once the action is over. Instead, it makes us keep looking, and makes us keep waiting, forcing us to wonder how an ordinary person — not a criminal, not a lost soul — comes back once they’ve been pushed too far. And it does so with grace, not only in the writing — especially the rich, textured renderings of the natural world — but in a final scene that even if you think you see it coming a few pages off (the event of it, anyway) still manages to sneak up and suddenly open a panorama as vast as the future, rather than a more familiar contraction of conflict.
The novel opens with one of the sisters, Geneva, cutting trees for firewood:
She was down by the quarry, just off the old logging road, claiming a patch of ground Auntie Marie had given her for a wedding present — her dowry. “Don’t tell him, though,” Marie suggested about the wooded acre. “Keep that land to yourself.” Geneva had thought of using the trees for sugaring as Auntie Marie had proposed but now it was too late. She was taking the trees for cheap firewood to sell to tourists at a roadside stand.
Geneva regrets the felling even as she performs it, because “It felt like a betrayal, this taking of saw to tree.” And in an act of fate if not fatality, the chainsaw slips and she loses an arm. This marks Geneva, not only in the obvious way but because the aftermath of this act in which she thought only of short-term gains (sacrificing long term potential for cash in hand) is an awareness of consequences and an ability to conceive of the future, something every other character in the novel seems to lack. She’s able to cast a cold eye on the past, while others nurse old hurts and cling to hazy recollections of who someone was a long time ago instead of noticing who they are now.
Other characters sleep with strangers, commit crimes, run out on each other, and generally fall victim to their own lack of forethought and vision. They’re focused on instant gratification, while Geneva aims to protect what she has, even when that protection turns violent. And Echolocation does get violent, very much so: what starts in the guise of a family saga enters country noir territory quickly, and brutally. So quickly, in fact, that as two characters set off on parallel courses to an inevitably showdown, I thought, “Already? If the big tension is happening now, how will it be sustained?” I was made suddenly aware, as a reader, of my own looking forward: I saw the amount of book left, the distance in pages, and it played against expectation with what felt like a third act escalation coming so soon.
Those dual tensions, from the plot itself and from my own thwarted assumptions, kept me both engrossed in the story and wondering, in the back of my mind, what Collins was going to do with all this. And what she did was impressive: ultimately, Echolocation goes where so few stories that build toward violence have the vision or courage to go: all the way to the aftermath. This isn’t a stories that winds up as soon as the clash has occurred, in which characters presumably settle back into routine once the action is over. Instead, it makes us keep looking, and makes us keep waiting, forcing us to wonder how an ordinary person — not a criminal, not a lost soul — comes back once they’ve been pushed too far. And it does so with grace, not only in the writing — especially the rich, textured renderings of the natural world — but in a final scene that even if you think you see it coming a few pages off (the event of it, anyway) still manages to sneak up and suddenly open a panorama as vast as the future, rather than a more familiar contraction of conflict.
sshabein's review against another edition
5.0
Echolocation is a perfect little book about reality hitting hard. It's about necessary roughness and begrudging tenderness, and it swallows one up while reading. I certainly look forward to experiencing more of Myfanwy Collins' work.
(My full review can be found at Glorified Love Letters.)
(My full review can be found at Glorified Love Letters.)
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