Colleen Mondor Reviews Where Echoes Die by Courtney Gould
Where Echoes Die, Courtney Gould (Wednesday Books 978-1-250-82579-7, $20.00, hc, 337pp) June 2023. Cover by Peter Strain.
I so rarely see young adult science fiction that a short description of Courtney Gould’s Where Echoes Die was enough to get me excited. (Abandoned military structures! Mysterious ‘‘treatment’’ center! An entire town suffering from sporadic memory loss!) Two sisters pursue their deceased mother’s obsession of a small town in Arizona. On the surface everything looks… perfect, but soon the questions are piling up, the weird behavior surrounding them is unavoidable, and then both teens get sick. What is going on in Backravel? It’s not what you think, but it is dangerous enough to kill Beck and Riley if they don’t get out before it’s too late.
After their mother’s death from cancer, Beck and Riley say all the right things to persuade their distant father that they are having a much-needed vacation with a friend and her family before a planned drive to move in with him in Texas. The truth, though, is that they are going to Arizona, to find out why their mother, a freelance investigative journalist, kept returning to Backravel but never produced her planned article on the town. Initially, everything seems fine. The local teens are friendly, the Airbnb owners are nice, and the town presents itself as being exceptionally ordinary (although no one seems to drive much), but when Beck takes a local tour with Avery (everyone she meets insists that all newcomers must take the tour with Avery!) she finds herself unsettled and determined to get to the truth.
Looking for answers about Backravel’s history leads to the town library, which is little more than a storage closet in city hall but does provide a few clues. Everyone talks about getting ‘‘treatments’’ at a local center run by Avery’s father, but no one will explain how the treatment works. Right about now, the reader will be thinking ‘‘Bad things are happening, Beck! Get you and your sister out of there!’’ As the plot unfolds, it becomes obvious the main character is suffering not only from grief, but also trauma from the difficult years before her mother died when Backravel took over life (and prompted her parents’ divorce). Beck thus might be seeing nefarious plots in Arizona where none exist, because she needs those plots to be there. She is certain there must be something in Backravel to explain why her mother kept leaving her daughters to go there, because if there isn’t she was just leaving, and Beck doesn’t know if she can survive that conclusion.
Where Echoes Die is a coming-of-age drama, a tender story of sibling love and parental devotion (there are many parents in this novel), and a wonderful, twisty, literary puzzle. When the explosive truth does come out, it is well worth every step in Gould’s tension-building narrative. In the end Beck learns… everything, and readers who are eager for a tightly written tale with no magic but plenty of science fiction mystery will be thrilled to spend time in Arizona with the Birsching sisters.
This review and more like it in the September 2023 issue of Locus.
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