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A review by panikos
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
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