Review copy was received from Author. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Echo by Jordan Leach Published by Self-Published on November 1, 2019
Genres: Science Fiction, Thriller
Pages: 283
Format: eARC
Source: Author
Goodreads
Amazon
Echo Fray, crippled by regret, has wasted his life after the loss of his family……Or so he believed.
Drafted by the elusive assassin, Natasha Vixen, Echo is given a chance at redemption when he learns time travel is real! Over the course of several years, he trains under Natasha’s direction to master his body and mind while harnessing the scientific properties which make time travel possible. As Echo faces a gauntlet of formidable enemies throughout his past, present, and future, secrets become unearthed that threaten everything he thought he knew. Now, he must choose to mend his life and be with the woman he loves or sacrifice it all to save a fractured universe.
Echo is a spacetime adventure with an interesting premise and story structure. When I opened my copy and it started at chapter 29, I thought maybe it got scrambled and I didn’t get a final version of the book. But this is by design, it is to help the reader understand where you are chronologically in the story and give the most emotional impact as things are revealed. Because the story jumps forward and backwards in time, it helped me keep my bearings.
Echo was the guy who never took a risk, didn’t go after the girl and fell apart after his mother’s death. After spending decades in prison, he is offered a bargain. He can spend the rest of his life exactly where he is, or he can be released into the care of a woman he has never seen before and take a different and dangerous journey with her.
Natasha has been time traveling/dimension jumping for hundreds of years. She even taught a few others how, but they’ve moved on from her and took everything she taught them to build their own personal paradises. That wouldn’t be totally bad, except they are taking things from other dimensions and time to do it creating havoc and the edges of spacetime are starting to fray and bleed through. Natasha needs Echo to help her destroy the men who are treating the universe like a candy store and figure out a way to stop it from unraveling.
I liked most of the story. There is just enough info on how time travel and spacetime jumping is supposed to work that I got it without it feeling like a lecture in the middle of a story. There are a few twists which had a nice emotional impact.
My only issues were, it gets a little cluttered at the end. There is a lot of time jumping, fighting, multiple same people and a weird chapter happening in the 5th dimension with some artistic liberties taken with how the words are written on the page that took a minute to adjust to. There is also one thread of the story I didn’t really understand why/what happened.
Overall, I’d say this is a decent sci-fi novel. Echo isn’t a perfect character, which makes him all the more relatable. He does some very questionable things throughout the book, but if you had control over spacetime what would be normal and acceptable to you after decades? For those of you like me that need a little romance in your reading there is a smidgen of one. It is adjacent to the overall story and never detracted from the spacetime adventure.
Act like we’re writing about Quark flavours or the subatomic composition of a meteorite. That’s pretty normal, right?
I have acquired wealth and power and prosperity and freedom…and I never once stopped to realize – we’re still not happy.
I fear the past.
I neglect the future.
And life passes me by.
About Jordan Leach
ordan Leach is an award winning screenwriter, author and filmmaker from Waukesha, WI who currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. He first put pen to paper with fictional short stories he wrote at the age of six. In high school, he transitioned to other mediums, cultivating the first film program in his county. He went on to achieve a degree in film and storytelling and moved to Los Angeles where he has worked in several studio corporations. He is currently a partner at Crooked Jaw Productions.
Spanning diverse genres and mediums, many of Jordan’s short stories and screenplays have gone on to win awards such as the Nichol’s Screenwriting Competition and the Southern California Screenplay Competition.
He is currently in production on his first feature film The Odyssey and is set to release his first published novel Echo. Jordan looks to continue in his craft, delving into various genres in the future across all formats.
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You’re right about not perfect characters. I didn’t know about this one but it looks good!
I like it when I don’t get characters that are too good to be true. Echo has some issues and while I didn’t like everything about him, I did like that he was human.
This sounds like it was put together in a really unique manner. I would have wondered what was going on when the book started with anything but chapter 1. It sounds like it was a bit jumbled but I like that it sounds really original. Great review!
A really different set up. I’m glad I went back to the forward to see why it was written in this manner. It made the emotional impact of the story better for sure.
I don’t read much in the way of time travel books. For the very reason they can get confusing. This one sounds okay:) And I really like that cover.
Same, that or I just think well if it is that easy why don’t you go fix this one thing and then it will all be perfect.
But it is fun when you find one that is a little bit different.