Reviews with content warning for Violence - The Echo Wife

Reviews tagging 'Violence'

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

57 reviews

puffinthedog's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Speaking as someone who is still unlearning the things I was taught throughout childhood and multiple abusive relationships- The Echo Wife was a heartbreaking novel of how childhood abuse and interpersonal violence strip people of their will and leaves them unsure who is making the choices for them, even in their own heads. If you don’t have a history of psychological abuse, perhaps it can be read as a book questioning the ethics of cloning, and with that framework I can’t tell you how good a story this is if that’s what you’re looking for. I have no idea how plausible the science is that backs the plot. But as someone who identified with Martine this story made me see things in myself that I knew were there and made me look directly at them in broad daylight in a way that, maybe for the first time, allowed me to really feel sad for myself and angry at my own Nathans (and Evelyns).

I don’t know if this book is a masterpiece in general or just a masterpiece for me, in this moment I’m in. I’m too deep in my own experience that resonates too loudly for me to comment on writing or storyline. I think both of those things were enjoyable and interesting, but the overall experience of this book is the emotion and the characters. I can see this falling flat for someone who just wants a fun sci-fi romp and not a look at how parenting, society, and intimate partner violence shapes people and makes us question how much free will we have and if it’s possible to break the programming in a world that wants us pleasant, submissive, and unquestioning.

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lilybearillini3's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I listened to the audiobook version read by Xe Sands. I didn't mind her as a narrator, but I had to listen to this book at 1.25x speed because it felt slow and the breaks were quite long. The premise of this book is really cool and I think executed quite well. We learn a lot about Evelyn and what in her past has made her the way she is. I was personally annoyed by her every now and then but I understand the circumstances. Each time I thought, "where is this story going? there's a decent amount of time left." I was hit with another issue they have to overcome. It was slow for me a few times but it definitely was interesting. The ending was alright, but I'm not sure how to make it better. This isn't something I would've picked up on my own but a co-worker suggested it and I'm glad I gave it a shot. I could see this becoming a movie.

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therainbowshelf's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Take cloning, moral amboguity, replacements, women in science, and a mysogenistic ex, mix them together with murder and a cover-up and out comes this book. It won't be for everyone, but I rather enjoyed this dark story. Every twist was intriguing and added to the experience nicely. I also really liked how Evelyn is written. She's an interesting character.

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schnaucl's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I liked it.

It's not quite clear to me what Evelyn's work actually is. Something with clones, obviously, but it's not clear what the clones are supposed to be for. Something more than organ donation if bone breaks have to be the same and conditioning is a thing.

It seems to take Martine an extraordinarily long time to figure out that Evelyn would be fine with clones being killed inside a lab setting, and in fact, had done it herself numerous times. Seeing Martine as an actual person with full autonomy was always going to be incompatible with her worldview that clones were things to be used and discarded.

The ending was inevitable and still chilling.

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riebread1's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

It was a good book but I wasn’t very invested. I found it easy to guess what would happen next. The concept as a whole is a good idea but it feels like there are short cuts to get to plot points.

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jojo_'s review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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taylor13's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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blackcatkai's review against another edition

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dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

CW: murder, death, pregnancy, casual ableism, blood, death, science experiments, violence, infidelity, sexism/misogyny, child abuse, abortion mentioned, domestic violence mentioned (off-page), alcohol use, medical content

I would not categorise this one as a thriller, but probably more a contemporary scifi suspense novel. I think it'd be a good intro novel if you want to get into either scifi or thrillers/suspense while being more into the other genre. This was my first Gailey novel and I will DEFINITELY be reading more of their work in the future. I had a ton of fun with this one & flew threw it. It's on the shorter end, length-wise, but the pacing was well done & characters engaging. Evelyn is awful & I love her. Martine deserved better & I honestly wouldn't mind a short story taking place a bit in the future after this story ends just to see how everyone turns out.

A great way to ease into the spooky season!

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maggies's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I think this book will stay with me. I read it in spare moments while traveling, but I thought about it a ton.

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panikos's review against another edition

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dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

The premise of The Echo Wife is just up my street, but the execution didn't quite hit the spot for me. Everything about it is passable. The prose is passable, though it often feels repetitive and a little cliched. The plot is passable, but feels cobbled-together in places. The characters are passable, but not as complex as they're trying to be.

The novel just has a somewhat unfinished feel. If you asked me to say what the themes of this book are, I think I'd actually struggle to articulate them. It's about self-hatred, definitely. It's about male violence and how men take away women's personhood. The themes are there, but I don't feel like the novel actually does much with them. Especially towards the end of the book, it seemed like the author was grappling around for a point - any point - but never quite found it.

The middle portion of the plot is interesting, but it does often feel like the world of the novel is simplified to allow the story to progress unhindered.

When Evelyn and Martine decided to grow a clone to replace Nathan, I thought that was a great turn in the narrative, a clever way to weave the speculative elements into the main conflict. However, it's very strange to me that nobody goes asking after Nathan in those intervening 3 months where they had to make the clone. Yes, they said he'd gone on a trip to the mountains, but how convincing would that really be? Where's the evidence to support it? I would've liked to see them doing more to maintain the lie outside of needing to make the clone. I never really felt that there was any threat of discovery, which drained the tension a lot. There were no police, no people asking after Nathan, no family members or friends or colleagues demanding answers. I know that Nathan was supposed to be pretty unnattached, but it felt weak. And it made the whole process of replacing him with a clone feel far, far too easy.

The ending also felt quite anticlimactic to me, and was definitely the point in the novel where the themes became the most confused.

The novel dedicates so much time to telling us that Nathan is a dreadful, controlling person. Yet the would-be twist in the final quarter of the novel is that...Nathan is an awful person. The moment where Martine finds the bodies of the old clones is clearly supposed to be hard-hitting, but it didn't really resonate with me, because it just felt like more of the same. I already knew that Nathan was terrible. And it seemed fairly obvious to me that Martine couldn't have been his first attempt at creating a clone of his wife. As with so much about the rest of the book, the logic also felt flawed; I couldn't understand why Nathan would bury so many failed clones in his garden, rather than burning them in the lab like standard. With Laila, perhaps it made sense, because he had likely brought her home first. But the others, which had fundamental defects with their growth and bodies - why would you take them all the way to the house to dispose of them?

Another thing the novel doesn't really manage to reconcile is that Evelyn, at least when it comes to how she treats clones, is no better than Nathan. We're supposed to see Nathan as twisted for creating clones and destroying them when they don't suit his purposes, but Evelyn does the same thing every single day, and she's still doing it by the end of the novel. She has come to see Martine as a person, but there's no real movement on how she sees clones as a whole - she's studying Martine to see how she bucked her programming, presumably because she wants to stop it happening again. She never comes to meaningfully question the morality and legitimacy of her own research, despite the fact that it's what made Nathan's actions possible. That felt like a massive missed opportunity to me, considering how theme of ethics permeated the book as a whole.

All in all, The Echo Wife did not live up to what I hoped it would be, but I still somewhat enjoyed it. I think the premise and concept are stellar on paper, but other stories have done a much better job at dissecting what it means to be able to clone and replace people, and what it means to come face to face with another version of yourself.

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