The Echoes of Us - Emma Steele - ★★

AUTHOR: Emma Steele

GENRE: Romance-Drama

PUBLICATION DATE: June 6, 2024

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: The blurb calls this “a captivating love story on an epic scale”, and to a certain extent, it is. But the ‘epic’ part of it takes time to get used to. Too jumpy and random for my liking. The ending saved my rating to a great extent, but I doubt that every reader will be as happy with how matters come to a close. This is an outlier review.

Plot Preview:

Robbie and Jenn, who were together for five years but then separated since the last eight months, have finally reconciled. But just as Jenn is about to tell Robbie something on the way back home, a truck comes hurtling towards their car. Robbie is immediately thrown into Jenn’s past, where he watches her across various ages and situations, and thus learns more about her life than she had ever told him. But why is Robbie suddenly a spectator to Jenn’s past? Can he figure out what went wrong in their relationship eight months ago? Can he repair the damage and modify the present to give them a better, happier future?

The story comes to us from multiple timelines in Robbie’s first-person perspective and also in Jenn’s third person point of view.

Bookish Yays:

💖 The ending: The book truly grabbed my attention only in the final few chapters, and especially with the ending, which is beautifully written. The ending is what saved my rating.

💖 Many introspective moments: It is said that during moments of death, our entire life flashes before our eyes. But why is Robbie seeing Jenn’s life instead of his own? The book tells you this in an interesting way.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

💓 The “time travel’ in this story doesn’t follow the typical pattern. Robbie is thrown back at various moments of Emma’s past, but he is just the spectator and for the most part, can do nothing except watch. This means that the book functions more like a typical multi-timeline story instead of as a time-travel story. I get why this was done, but it didn’t help my interest level.

💓 There’s a secret that is dangled in front of us many times. When it finally comes out, it is definitely an unexpected revelation, and an interesting one too. But the way in which it comes out feels almost like an infodump.

Bookish Nays:

💔 So many timelines! There are jumps not just across years (1999, 2014, 2009, 2019,…) but also across time periods such as “two days later”, “five weeks later”, “two weeks before”,… I simply couldn’t keep track after a point. It might have been easier if the timeline were linear but the jumps are totally random, and often occur even within chapters. This might still work for those who go with the flow, but I am diligent about knowing and keeping track of where the story is, so it didn’t work for me.

💔 To add to the above, the narrative focus also jumps between Robbie’s first-person and Jenn’s third-person perspectives, sometimes within the same chapter, and at times, more than once within the same chapter. So we aren’t just changing across timelines but also across narrators and grammatical voices a multitude of times throughout the book. The flow hence feels very haphazard.

💔 The proceedings are slow and repetitive for most of the way. Things get interesting only from chapter 32 onwards. While I was invested in the initial few chapters, I soon got bored of watching Robbie watch Jenn and introspecting about what to do.

💔 Much of the plot seems to lay the blame for the relationship breakdown on Robbie’s shoulders. However, there is way too much miscommunication from Jenn’s side. Can a person be blamed for not knowing some things about his partner when his partner herself didn’t reveal anything? This book reminded me why I hate the miscommunication trope so much.

💔 The connection between the lead couple didn’t seem strong. This might partly be as they had broken up and just reunited, but even otherwise, each kept so many things from the other that I didn’t feel strongly about either of them, nor about their relationship.

💔 The above also means that both the main characters are almost like unreliable narrators, both towards each other and towards us the readers. We know a little about them and the people in their lives, and later, we learn facts that contradict the earlier revelations. Not a fan of this writing trope.

💔 I don’t know about other readers, but having a Jenn and a Jill in the same story was very confusing, especially as both were often in the scene together.

All in all, this might still work for readers who love introspective or mawkish romances. It is not for those who prefer happy-happy love stories as this is more on the emotional side. It is also not for those who enjoy time travel stories because that label isn’t completely accurate.

I do appreciate the creative idea of the premise, but the execution was very disjointed and dragged out. It might have worked better as a novella.

I think this is a debut work. And if yes, I must admire the scale of the author’s imagination and the intricacies of the plotlines. Though the tracks didn’t work for me, I admire how she knew where she wanted the story to go, and led us there, albeit in a roundabout way.

Mine is an outlier review, so please do read other reviews and take a call. But if you do want to give this romance novel a try, I’d advise against the audio version, if and when it comes out. Only the most focussed of audio listeners would be able to make sense of all that hopping across times and characters.

2 stars. (With 1 star being for the exceptional final 18-20% of the book. Everything else put together gets only 1 star.)

My thanks to Headline, Mountain Leopard Press, NetGalley and The Pigeonhole for the DRC of “The Echoes of Us”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.