Title: Our Last Echoes
Author: Kate Alice Marshall
Published: March 2021, Viking Books for Young Readers
Format: ARC E-copy, 416 pages
Source: Netgalley via Publisher
Summary:
Kara Thomas meets Twin Peaks in this supernatural thriller about one girl’s hunt for the truth about her mother’s disappearance.Sophia’s
first memory is of drowning. She remembers the darkness of the water
and the briny taste as it fills her throat. She remembers the cold shock
of going under. She remembers her mother pulling her to safety before
disappearing forever. But Sophia has never been in the ocean. And her
mother died years ago in a hospital. Or so she has been told her whole
life.
A series of clues have led Sophia to the island of Bitter
Rock, Alaska, where she talked her way into a summer internship at the
Landon Avian Research Center, the same center her mother worked at right
before she died. There, she meets the disarmingly clever Liam, whose
own mother runs the LARC, as well as Abby, who’s following a mystery of
her own: a series of unexplained disappearances. People have been
vanishing from Bitter Rock for decades, leaving only their ghostly
echoes behind. When it looks like their two mysteries might be one and
the same, Sophia vows to dig up the truth, no matter how many lies she
has to tell along the way. Even if it leads her to a truth she may not
want to face.
Our Last Echoes is an eerie collection of found documents and written confessionals, in the style of Rules for Vanishing, with supernatural twists that keep you questioning what is true and what is an illusion.
My thoughts: This is the first book I’ve read by Kate Alice Marshall and I really liked it. It definitely had some supernatural elements to it, which I don’t typically gravitate towards, but here in this book it just worked.
This story really kept me engaged from start to finish. I don’t typically read a whole lot of YA or horror but this one didn’t seem very scary as a whole, but more creepy and spooky, which was fine by me. It is definitely very atmospheric and I loved that, and I appreciated the legends and how they were worked into the story. I also loved the way the mixed media was worked into the story – the videos, the interviews, the dialogue from the past and present – that really kept things interesting and the book moving.
While this isn’t my typical genre – YA or horror, every once in a while, I like stepping out of my comfort zone and something about this book called me to and I’m glad I took a chance on it because it worked for me. I will definitely be checking out more of this authors work and seeing what other books are similar.
