Reading Skywards – Your Friendly Bookshelf

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS BOOK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books
Publication date ‏ : ‎February 2021
Format:  Hardcover, Paperback, audiobook, and ebook
Print length ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
Genre:  Science Fiction Suspense

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS BOOK?

I am trying hard to keep reading at least one book through audiobook, and I can be very picky about the narrator. However, I was watching a YouTuber saying she was reading this book, and I decided to get the audiobook as it was available in Libby. The narration was excellent. Taking into consideration that this book has a heavy scientific backbone with the whole clones theme, it was easy to understand and follow. It was also less than 8 hours long, which was a plus.

MY PERSONAL OPINION OF “THE ECHO WIFE”

I started this book with zero expectations. I liked it because it was an 8-hr audiobook, which was significantly shorter than other available audiobooks in Libby at the time of choosing the book.

The first 15% of the book was interesting, and was easy to follow as we started understanding the main character, Evelyn, her scientific accolades, and her personal failure, which was her marriage.

Then the story jumps right in. All of a sudden, you see Evelyn understanding how the betrayal of her ex-husband is about to implode on her scientific research, which is cloning. All of a sudden, she is confronted with destructive truths that leave her with no other choice but to accept and work with her own clone to salvage her career.

Throughout the whole story, we are faced with important questions about cloning and what it means to create another human “in a lab”. A person who, to her eyes, is nothing more than a specimen that needs to be destroyed once its purpose is accomplished. When does a clone goes from specimen to a person capable of thriving for freedom, safety, and love?

The story goes back and forth from Evelyn’s childhood to her life as a young, promising scientist, to a wife working through her professional goals. A person not willing to compromise her planned-out life as a scientist for the sake of motherhood and homemaking.

Through the book, both Evelyn and her clone, Martine, teach us that we can grow and accept changes, but we do not need to constrain ourselves to the expectations of others, even when others are our loved ones.

PREMISE OF THE BOOK AS FOUND IN AMAZON / GOODREADS:

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe’s plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

MY RATING: 3.7

QUOTES FROM THE BOOK

“The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens in inches. In a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.”

“He was relieved to have told me. He transmuted his guilt into my anger and now I was the one who had to carry it and he had the audacity to be relieved.”

“There’s no winning. Either I’m a bitch who needs to control everything, or I’m an easy mark.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hugo award winner Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and they are a regular contributor for Tor.com and Barnes & Noble. Their most recent fiction credits include Fireside Fiction, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their debut novella, River of Teeth, was published in 2017 via Tor.com and was a 2018 Hugo and Nebula award finalist. Their adult novel debut, Magic For Liars, was published by Tor Books in June 2019. Their Young Adult novel debut, When We Were Magic, will be published by Simon Pulse in Spring 2020. You can find links to their work at http://www.sarahgailey.com; find them on social media @gaileyfrey.

Bibliography:

• Make me Better: a Novel
• Spread me (on my TBR)
• Just Like Home
• Upright Women Wanted
• Magic for Liars: a Novel
• a lot more!!