The Echo Wife - Tumblr Posts

We went to the bookstore, ostensibly so I could pick up/order books for family for xmas.

Unsurprisingly, we ended up buying surprise books. Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey promised to be a gripping, disturbing read. I picked it up for Dad, who loves sci fi. Long Shadow promises to be a sweet and fantastical romance, which I got for myself.

Did you guess already? I read all of Echo Wife in one sitting. (I'm about halfway through Long Shadow now)

Echo Wife is very very good and I'll be back soon* to babble about it

*"soon" not guaranteed

Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey (thoughts)

I really loved The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey. It was utterly gripping.

Summary:

I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married. It took me so long to hate him. Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be. And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband. Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up. Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

more thoughts and very many spoilers below the jump

content note: The Echo Wife is a little bit about cloning, much more about identity and murder, and very much about abuse. Also in this ramble, I advocate for murder and refer casually to suicide. That’s not a book-content-warning, that’s a me-content-warning.

I picked up the Echo Wife as a gift for someone else, and I immediately sat down and read the whole thing the same afternoon.

Here’s the summary I stole off GoodReads

I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married. It took me so long to hate him. Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be. And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband. Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up. Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

The other way I described it to partner was that it “started disturbing, continued disturbing, and ended disturbing.”

Evelyn’s father was abusive, and she and her mother survived him.

She thinks of her ex-husband Nathan as sloppy, lazy, and weak. She prioritizes strength, clarity of purpose, and control.

Martine is the version of Evelyn that Nathan made as... a vessel of his fantasies of what she could have been? This fantasy doesn’t include “not abused,” or “independent.”

Evelyn is not kind to her mother, nor Nathan, nor ultimately Martine. In fact, by the end of the book she’s basically just recreated her childhood home with herself in her father’s place. It’s a satisfying ending because it feels... well that full-circle feeling, it’s just right. But it’s obviously not a happy ending.

It’s also a little odd at times because after Martine kills Nathan...

(obligatory gif)

... after Martine kills Nathan, she and Evelyn are understandably freaking out. They take care of the body, it’s all G.

But then later, they decide they need to clone him to “bring him back.” Okay, in principle I support this because, as an author, why even have cloning technology if you’re not going to use it to cover up murders? But they go whole-hog and try to clone him to bring him back... so he can resume his “normal life???” GIRL NO. Bring him back, but then have him kill himself! C’mon now.

But of course they bring him back properly, which I suppose is in service to the theme (domestic abuse, the cyclical nature of abuse). And then he goes back to his regular life. And then Martine calls Evelyn again. (NICE)

My previous gripe aside, I actually loved the ending of this book. It just felt very tight and satisfying (even though it was, yanno, distressing). It was perfect for what the book was, and it gave me a nice tight feeling somewhere between a jumpscare and a satisfied shiver.

In conclusion, I strongly, strongly recommend this book--with the usual caveats about the book’s themes, content notes, etc. But if that sort of thing isn’t a dealbreaker, I think it’s a really great book.

2022 reading retrospective: summa cum laude

I've never done a reading retrospective blog post thingy before, but i started one for 2022 and it immediately spiraled out of control. we're breaking it into parts.

For structure, I threw together these categories:

Nonfiction

Fear and Fungi

Mystery

Romance

summa cum laude

This post is about my summa cum laude picks!

(Summa cum laude means "with highest honor," in case anyone is unfamiliar. Latin. Can't escape it.)

Here are the ones that I've already written about but that deserve to be on this here summa cum laude list:

Every single book on my mystery list (yep!)

Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) (horror)

The Heroine's Journey (Gail Carriger) (nonfiction)

The Duke Who Didn't (Courtney Milan) and The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (Cat Sebastian) (capital-R genre Romance)

Here are the ones that are AMAZING and don't fit in those other categories:

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers

Nettle and Bone, T Kingfisher

the Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey

The Mountain the Sea, Ray Nayler

Spoilers & opinions below the jump

SCI FI: The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Becky Chambers) is the last(?) installment in her Wayfarers series, which started with the fantastic Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, continued through the very different A Closed and Common Orbit, and then to the Record of a Spaceborn Few. In my opinion, The Galaxy and the Ground Within is something of a return to what I loved about Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. It's a bottle episode and there's a cast of characters (not a single human in the bunch) who basically explore their similarities and differences. I really, really liked this one. There was some really neat worldbuilding, and I felt like there was some good work with theme and identity as well. Also, I can't talk about Chambers's writing without gushing about how her aliens feel really alien--you really get the bio vibe, they don't just feel like re-skinned humans.

FANTASY: Nettle and Bone (T Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon). This one was very gripping. Vernon can be very grim when she wants to be, but the grimness is in the world more than the story, if that makes sense? So the story itself has a satisfying ending, but some of the--okay so this one has big content notes for sexism, abuse, pregnancy and pregnancy loss, all that. It's really well done, but the themes are so so present.

Also the magic is very evocative and... numinous? Which is to say, not hard magic at all, but things Feel right in a "rooted in folklore" way while still being original in the actual mix. It's such good stuff. This book has it all; it's one of the ones I preordered as a hard copy because I was so, so excited about it, and I'm very pleased with my purchase.

Dramatic sci-fi: The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey. This book is insanely good, it's gripping, it's disturbing. I wrote about it already so I'll just drop a link.

Near Sci-fi: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor. I also wrote about this one. I finished it a while ago, and I'm still thinking about it and digesting it. Link here.

In conclusion, that's 13 excellent books that I strongly recommend! Here's to 2023!