Title: The Echo Wife
Author: Sarah Gailey
Publisher: TOR
Release Date: February 16, 2021
Pages: 256
Book Source: Netgalley
“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.
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It took me so long to hate him.
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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.
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And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband.
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Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.
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Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.”
Kim’s Review
**
I was very impressed with The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey. I could see a book club getting into a great discussion over it with all the ideas about ethics, cloning, feminism, and more. Or it can just be read for enjoyment as a fast paced thriller, and I really hope they turn The Echo Wife into a movie!
I can’t go into details because spoilers would start right away. It is one crazy thing after another, and Evelyn handles most of it pretty well. I would be a basket case if it happened to me… but I’m not a scientist with an analytical mind. Even with all the far out scenarios it never felt like a soap opera to me, and the science that is intertwined throughout the book is explained so well that I don’t think anyone would have problems understanding it.
So you may be wondering why I didn’t give this excellent book five stars… and there are two reasons, both of which happened more towards the end of the book.
The first is I found myself skimming because Evelyn kept going off on tangents about her feelings. This fit with the book, but I didn’t have empathy for her since she is such a cold, but excellently written character. I wanted to find out what was going to happen next and her emotions were dragging the story down. But other readers may really enjoy it.
The second, was a couple of scenarios that happened, and Gailey just had the character say, “I didn’t think of this, even though I should have.” To me it felt like a bit of a cop-out and that Gailey just didn’t have a strong way to fix it so just wanted to let it slide by. The rest of the story was so well written that this really stood out to me.
Those two little quirks shouldn’t stop you from reading The Echo Wife though, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
**
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