No True Echo

July 20, 2015
Eddie Dane’s life in the British town of Wellcome Valley is as predictable as it is dull: ride the bus with his friend Angus, take care of his depressed grandmother after school, feel slightly sorry for himself for having grown up without a mother, and repeat. When a redheaded girl named Scarlett shows up in town, strange things start happening, and suddenly Eddie is pulled into a repetitive loop of an entirely different kind: he starts “echo jumping” back to the same Thursday when Scarlett first arrived. In some of the altered time lines that follow, Eddie’s mother is alive; in others, Eddie is murdered. Skipping between Eddie’s story and a future in which so-called echo technology has reshaped life, Jones (Constable & Toop) offers a roller-coaster of a story that drives forward one moment, then yanks itself backward again. This playful time-bending saga twists in, out, and around so often that readers are forced to stay on their toes, but the effort is well worth it as Jones introduces heady ideas about memory, reality, and existence. Ages 12–up.