Review: Our Last Echoes by Kate Alice Marshall

Author: Kate Alice Marshall
Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: March 2021

Sophia's first memory is of drowning. She remembers the darkness of the water and the briny taste as it fills her throat. She remembers the cold shock of going under. She remembers her mother pulling her to safety before disappearing forever. But Sophia has never been in the ocean. And her mother died years ago in a hospital. Or so she has been told her whole life.

A series of clues have led Sophia to the island of Bitter Rock, Alaska, where she talked her way into a summer internship at the Landon Avian Research Center, the same center her mother worked at right before she died. There, she meets the disarmingly clever Liam, whose own mother runs the LARC, as well as Abby, who's following a mystery of her own: a series of unexplained disappearances. People have been vanishing from Bitter Rock for decades, leaving only their ghostly echoes behind. When it looks like their two mysteries might be one and the same, Sophia vows to dig up the truth, no matter how many lies she has to tell along the way. Even if it leads her to a truth she may not want to face.

I really enjoyed Rules for Vanishing, so I was looking forward to reading Our Last Echoes.  Unfortunately, my experience with this book was not as enjoyable.  To be honest, I can't really even tell you what was going on in a large majority of this book.   Read the synopsis above.  I did and the book I got was not what I was expecting.  I just found this book pretty confusing.   Toward the end, you do get somewhat of an explanation of what is going on, but I still have so many questions.  And it came a bit too late for me.  

This book took me forever to get through.  I probably should have DNF'd it.  The only reason that I finished it was that I had heard that it was loosely connected to Rules for Vanishing.  It has been a while since I read that book, so  I can't really say how they connect.   The characters were dull and forgettable. Especially the main character Sophia.  Except Abby, I did like her.  But she wasn't enough to save the book for me.  The ending, I think, left it up for a sequel to this one.  I'm not sure if I will read the next one.  I don't think I would really recommend this.