Book Review: Echo Nova
Today I am a guest contributor on author Jennifer Hallmark’s blog. She has an excellent Friday Fiction segment featuring speculative fiction book reviews.
Time Travel! Readers seem to love it or hate it. I was enticed to pick up Echo Nova because I love time travel stories! This affinity began when I was a child, thanks to watching classic BBC Dr. Who. Echo Nova by Clint Hall is a YA, sci-fi dystopian adventure with a clean romantic subplot.
Dashiel Keane is a poor teenager from a future North America earning money for his disabled brother by rooftop racing as The Red Dragon. Everything changes when he gets the opportunity to become a timestar- paid to perform daring deeds throughout time for the entertainment of the present. Dash wrestles with duty to family and the cost of fame as he realizes the corporation cutting his checks isn’t all that it seems. Dash finds himself involved in a conflict bigger than himself, with society-alterating consequences.
This fast-paced adventure from Dash’s POV features tech-assisted parkour, time travel, dinosaurs, samurai, pirates, and cowboys. I appreciate that the characters in this story behave like realistic teenagers. They are also active participants in the story with relatable strengths and weaknesses. This is a story that has the epic feel of popular trilogies like The Hunger Games condensed into a standalone. Dash wrestles with important questions of what it means to be human. I love the way the author explains the time travel technology: it’s simple yet thought- provoking. The short chapters give this book good pacing, although the ending is such a firehose of action and reveals that I had to read the last few chapters over again! It has a thought provoking and hopeful conclusion with Biblical illusions.
This book is perfect for teenage boys and anyone who enjoys YA. Read this book and give it to your friends- it’s so fun to talk about with spoilers!
Content Considerations: Violence: killing/war without gruesome descriptions. Romance: clean, kissing only
Quotes:
“My father says his generation marveled at the ability to be sent back through the timestream to another time platform-called a lily pad- in the past. He says walking among the people in the past is a privilege, and he's never used the word echoes to describe them like everybody else. He doesn't like the term lily pad, either, as actual lily pads are anchored to the same point in a stream of water rather than floating along with the current the way time platforms do.”
“The city of Azariah stretches out in front of me-a menagerie of lights and sounds and flying machines. Far below, people hustle through the rain. A few stand still like they have no place to go. I’ve watched them many times, seen the expression of surrender on their faces, always swearing that would never be me.”
“But maybe there’s something more, something beyond the timestream, a well from which time flows and an energy that moves it along. It makes what I do seem insignificant, but sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of it.”