Book Review: Echo

ECHO| Thomas Olde Heuvelt
02.08.2022 | Tor Nightfire
Rating: 3/5 stars

Travel journalist and mountaineer Nick Grevers awakes from a coma to find that his climbing buddy, Augustin, is missing and presumed dead. Nick’s own injuries are as extensive as they are horrifying. His face wrapped in bandages and unable to speak, Nick claims amnesia—but he remembers everything. He remembers how he and Augustin were mysteriously drawn to the Maudit, a remote and scarcely documented peak in the Swiss Alps. He remembers how the slopes of Maudit were eerily quiet, and how, when they entered its valley, they got the ominous sense that they were not alone. He remembers: something was waiting for them… 

But it isn’t just the memory of the accident that haunts Nick. Something has awakened inside of him, something that endangers the lives of everyone around him…

Echo is probably one of the strangest books I’ve read this year. By no means do I mean that to have a negative connotation because I genuinely liked my time listening to this audiobook, but wow did it have my head spinning! If I had to describe Echo I would call it mysterious, claustrophobic, and haunting. This is a story that feels like folklore meets modern day with a lot of callbacks to interesting traditions and beliefs. Add in an extremely secluded location and this book becomes the perfect setting for chills while reading.

Heuvelt does a fantastic job of building tension regarding what’s happening to Nick. Throughout the entire book I was committed to understanding what was happening and where things were going to end. One of my biggest struggles with the book was the pacing of the story. There’s a mixture of fast-paced sections with some very slow and repetitive sections mixed between. Despite the pacing concerns, I was in for the long-haul, which you’ll need to be, as this book is fairly chunky. The physical copy might not look like it, but the font inside is very small. 

🎧: I loved the narrators for this book! They truly embodied the characters and brought the story to life in an incredibly convincing manner.

A huge thank you to Tor Nightfire for my gifted copy!