The Echo Wife
Ratings132
Average rating3.6
Apparently I read this some time in 2023, and then forgot about it. Went to read my new copy, and it felt strangely familiar. Indeed, it's twin is sitting on the shelf in my bookcase. How very apt.
I love Sarah Gailey - the rawness; the way her characters transcend the rules for femininity even to the reader's discomfort. This was great, twisty, reflective and quick-paced. What does identity mean? How much are we shaped by who we are versus what happens to us?
This is a great book. Though on its surface it is fictional, there's a lot of philosophical questions that arise from us. What does being “human” mean? What does being alive entail and where do we draw the line? Though in essence this book has mystery and some scifi elements, the philosophical questions stood out to me at the end, which I greatly appreciate as someone who doesn't generally read books with philosophical ponderings in mind.
I strongly enjoyed this book, but at the same time, I feel vaguely unsatisfied by it.
The story itself, the plot and concept, is great. I like the cloning aspect and the bit of me that reads true crime is fascinated by ‘conditioning', because of course you'd need to do that but also, oh my god. This is a book that pitches itself, you just read the description and grab it up in a second because how can you not?!
However, the execution, the specifics of the characters and their interactions, I wish I knew more about them. I wish Evelyn were able to sit down with her mother at some point and just like, gently doubletalk around their similar experiences with regards to the men they married. I had honestly expected Martine and Evelyn to use the killswitch almost immediately-I fully thought that they were making 2.0 just so he can die ‘naturally', sobbing wife at the funeral, etc. I wanted Evelyn to examine her own issues more strongly, she's sitting on the fence as it relates to the humanity of Martine and their sisters and it feels like she never really came to terms on either side of that fence.
It's definitely more of a 3.5 for me.
I decided to pick this one because I really enjoyed one novella of the author, Upright Women Wanted. While that was a lot of fun, this book is a whole collection of WTF moments.
Considering this is my first book with clones, I understood whatever basic scientific information that author wanted to give us. And despite the subject matter of this novel, it is less of a sci-fi and more of a character driven story of two women who've been betrayed by the same man. While one of them is full of anger and regrets and wonders who exactly knows the real her, the other woman just wants the agency to be able to make her own decisions and be proud of them. The struggles they go through together until they form a very unique kind of relationship is very fascinating to read about. It was also interesting to contemplate if cloning would become a reality in our future and what kind of moral and ethical dilemmas we would have to face.
In the end, this was both mind blowing and mundane at the same time. Interesting concepts and characters make this an enjoyable thriller, but the ending kinda didn't live up to my expectations. However, if you enjoy futuristic stories that'll make you think while also entertaining you, then I would totally recommend this book.
for something that could've easily felt like a domestic thriller in a way sarah gailey created something else entirely and wow... what a delight. this book just may be my favorite gailey so far?
Reminder to self: Greatly enjoyed the first part of the book, and the finale felt rushed. Maybe I just want to learn more about what happened next. 3.5 pushing 4 stars.
Stacks of Strange Book Club Pick - March
Going in I had no idea what this book was about, and I really enjoyed it! While this book didn't have much plot or thriller elements I don't think it needed it. It really worked with just exploring the characters and the situations/emotions between them! This book will be discussed in much greater depth in the liveshow!
The Echo Wife by author Sarah Gailey is a story that so many people who have been in relationships understand. Love can be sloppy; it can be messy and painful. Sarah takes what could have been a typical romantic triangle type of story and puts a beautiful science fiction twist on it. What happens when your husband leaves you for another woman? And what if that woman happens to be your clone?
“The floor was well polished.
Dragging him across it wasn't hard at all.”
Evelyn Caldwell is successful, brilliant, and driven. She is everything her husband wants...almost. Evelyn is a brilliant research scientist, a pioneer in cloning technology that allows clones not to be just physiological copies but also copies of personalities. Her personal life is very much unlike her professional life. She is calculating and brilliant; at home, she is standoffish with her husband, Nathan. She gets frustrated with him. But then Nathan dies in questionable circumstances, and things get messy, especially when Martine comes into play.
There are things that Evelyn doesn't know. Nathan has left her for another woman, but that woman, Martine, is a copy of her. Not only that, but Nathan has used the Caldwell method, a method that Evelyn developed to weed out what he thinks of were undesirable personality traits. It has a very Stepford Wives meets Frankenstein gone wild feel to it. The death of Nathan causes a weird alliance with Martine, her clone. There is a love triangle aspect to the story, sure. But more importantly, Gailey takes the unlikely buddy crime story and turns it on its ear.
“He was relieved to have told me. He transmuted his guilt into my anger and now I was the one who had to carry it and he had the audacity to be relieved.”
I know what you are thinking; the premise of this sounds like a science-fiction soap opera. In lesser hands, the story could have come off that way. But Sarah Gailey is a brilliant writer, and instead of contrived science fiction nonsense, we get a deep intellectual story about relationships. Are we nature or nurture? Would we have come out the same had we lived in different circumstances? According to Gailey, the answers to that are way more complicated.
The story is dark and intelligent. I love that Gailey got me thinking. I think a mark of any good science fiction novel is when you are thinking about it long after the story has ended. And to be sure, I spent a long thinking about the characters and some of the philosophical questions they write about in The Echo Wife.
“There were other holes scattered through the yard, shallow ones, and I realized that she must have been searching for the boundaries of her discovery—trying to see if her entire garden was planted on a necropolis.”
Also, the story is packed! It is a significant idea and premise that has been condensed down to raw writing and emotions. There is not an ounce of flouncing around with swirly dialect and unnecessary scenes. The story is tight, and the dialog is crisp. Exactly what should happen in a story of this length.
Once again, I am deeply affected by the skill of author Sarah Gailey. I think that if you love interesting philosophical questions and a unique story around cloning, this is a good fit for you.
That was so good. Through most of the book is was a 4 stars book for me but then the ending came was a 5 stars, I did not see it coming but once it was there it made all the sense in the world (I'm sure other readers will see it coming there is some foreshadowing that I can see plain as day now that I know how the story end but for me it was very effective).
Evelyn is peculiar thanks to her unique mix of trauma and professional deformation which causes her narrative to go from alien to very human sometimes very rapidly and it's unsettling at times, which to me speaks volume about Gailey's writing skills. If you like character studies and endings that leave you with a full story but still unanswered questions you'll like this.
This was a very weird book. I enjoyed it, loved the science fiction aspect of it and it seemed, at least to me, the topic was very well researched. The concept was definitely unique and I was intrigued by where the story was going.
I think that the fact I thought this was a thriller impacted my enjoyment, it didn't really fit the genre in my opinion. That isn't necessarily bad, but it did impact my enjoyment, while listening to it, considering that I kept expecting something to happen for it to become a thriller. If that makes sense.
Anyway, this story is very well written, has some mystery (not much though) and it kept me interested. The ending... wasn't my favorite. Or maybe I missed the point.
Overall, I liked it for its uniqueness and it's definitely an entertaining book. I just didn't love it.
I ended up a little on the fence about this one, I think because it turned into a very different story than the one I was expecting. On the one hand, the ending packs a lot of punch and really took me by surprise. On the other hand, it was not a very pleasant surprise.
Also, as a new mom, the part where Martine abandons her newborn to the murder clone is both heart-wrenching and hard to believe given what we know about Martine as a person. My brain just went, "Nope," and I think Martine's would too given that she is programmed to be a mom and to put her child first. I can't imagine she wouldn't have considered how to get the baby out during their plan, even if it meant continuing to fake her relationship with clone Nathan. Evelyn might forget to consider this, but Martine wouldn't
Other than that, I did enjoy the book as a sort of reverse murder mystery even though Evelyn herself is pretty horrible all around. Get a therapist, Evelyn. Seriously.
The underlying science fiction plot is well-crafted in the way it twists and turns, but what I appreciated most was the description of the main character's inner thoughts. At times uncomfortably recognizable, she's got a desire to be in control, and has many of the flaws she sees in other people (her husband, lab assistants and parents), but is in perfect denial about that.
Evelyn is an award winning scientist; something something clone technology and her husband is having an affair with a clone who looks just like Evelyn but is everything Evelyn is not. If that's not a creepy, sinister premise, I don't know what is.
The Echo Wife is good, not excellent. The first half builds beautifully toward a grand finale but it doesn't quite deliver what I was promised. Or maybe I was expecting something extra dark and twisty (and something is truly wrong with me). Evelyn is quite the anti hero and I love it, but I wish Gailey had spent my words building her up through her surroundings and relations (instead of isolating her so much).
If you like the premise, definitely read it!
“I'm not a monster,” Evelyn said.
Then am I the monster? Because I admit I laughed a few times in shock and dismay while devouring this book—it's a beautifully written, twisted delight. I don't like to watch Black Mirror, yet this book would fit snuggly in within the Black Mirror-verse. Since the story is from Evelyn's point of view, I had the best time trying understand her decision-making process and mapping out her morality while keeping a suspicious eye on Nathan and Martine. This book was a great read from beginning to end. The characters felt well-developed and broke my heart at times. I'm favoriting this one, for sure.
Another ‘hmm' book. I never really worked out whether we are meant to sympathise with the main character but I found her distinctly unlikeable. Despite this, the book kept me involved, although I'm not sure that it really reached a satisfactory conclusion; there seemed a few too many issues left unresolved. So, this falls into the 3-4 star abyss; it kept me reading but ultimately was unsatisfactory.
One of my top books of the year, definitely one of the best arcs I???ve ever had the pleasure of reviewing. I picked it up mainly due to the author???s name as I???ve only every heard great things said about her books but I???d never read one myself. And this was a phenomenal place to start.
I love the mixing of genres, so a science fiction thriller mystery was absolutely going to be on my highly anticipated list. I had forgotten the premise of the book by the time it came around to reading it (as I seem to always say in these reviews, but it has paid off well for me in the past), so I loved being thrown straight into the science fiction world where our main character works as a renowned scientist studying clones.
I thought I knew what I was getting into but although this book is only 250-ish pages, it feels like a 500 page epic. So much happens over the course of the book and there isn???t a single wasted scene. Everything is so tightly and masterfully engineered to craft this story with no fat to trim. There were multiple points where I reacted out loud to moments.
The initial idea was a great one, but the execution elevated the story so much further. The writing was excellent, there was tonnes of insight into our main characters and the plot progressed so steadily there was no dull moment. I hope this book gets adapted, I think it could be perfect on the big screen.
This book had such a unique plot. If you are looking for something short, sci-fi (cloning), and original, give this one a try.
