ECHO

The sorceress of iridescent language is back again in a tale a bit sparer and a bit darker than her usual. Once again, Block (The Rose and the Beast, 2000, etc.) takes a story and illuminates it from the perspectives of all the interrelated protagonists. Once again, the glitter of Los Angeles is a major character, and in this case the duller-in-contrast metropolis of New York is a minor one. Once again, fantasy elements act as grace notes against a gritty if spangled reality. Echo feels shut out of the intense love story of her parents: her mother’s gentle perfection and her father’s adoration of his wife. When her father is dying of cancer and her mother consumed by his care and her impending loss, Echo escapes to self-starvation and alcohol. She longs to find someone who will love her as her father loves her mother. As the story winds on, readers see Echo’s parents’ courtship, the mysterious boy—does he really have wings?—who rescues Echo from drowning, the connections of people named Smoke and Thorn and Eden with Echo. Intense but not explicit eroticism, the lure of wrong choices, and the ultimate redemption of love at the right time will keep readers mesmerized until the last page. (Fiction. YA)