Echo

by Marguerite Valentine

Echo is growing up. She’s sharp, quirky, funny, with a snippy relationship with her mother. She finds life, especially men, a challenge. From meeting her first and only love, finding out about her missing father, her obsession with a Welsh poet, and a disastrous experience with a therapist, life is a problem. But problems require solutions and Echo is determined to find her own. Using imagination and humour she finds a way to get her own back.

Written in her own words, this is a magical tale of desire, fantasy, and revenge, which reveals how one woman played one man at his own game and got away with it.

278 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 11, 2016

Reviews

[Trevor Stubbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is compelling. It tells the story of a girl on the edge of womanhood who is exploring herself and her world. Echo's mother is absorbed in her obsession with abstract art, and in the long summer holidays, Echo is forced to leave her home and her friends in London, and go and stay in a farmhouse on the Welsh side of the River Severn. Here her mother can meet up with like-minded people set on exhibiting her work, but Echo, an only child and who has never known a father, is left largely to her own devices. In her exploration of her surroundings she meets a boy, and that's where the strange adventure begins.
This is no ordinary story. Packed with psychological tension and confused questions about what her life is really about, we travel with Echo as she explores dangerous dead ends and painful places. Is what she feels real, or is it all in the mind?
Echo is well-written, fascinating and alive will contemporary issues. Marguerite Valentine has worked as a professional psychologist, and in all its unexpected mystery, this tale is true to life. If you want a book that takes you into what it is like for a young person in Britain today, one that is epitomised in its setting of the beautiful, powerful but potentially dangerous reaches of the lower River Severn, than you will enjoy this book and learn something on the way.