TL;DR lots of melodrama about "destiny" and "true love", tbh
(finished 7/3/15)
As a disclaimer, I read Fated quite a while ago. (Goodreads says I read it back in Jan 2012, but also that the book was published May 2012, so I'm not sure how that works considering I bought it from a thrift store and it definitely wasn't an ARC.) I remember very little of Fated other than the fact that I wasn't impressed enough to keep my copy. It may still actually be in the house, though. I'll have to check and re-read it if I find it.
Let me also say that I don't think I'm really in the target audience for this book. (This seems to be happening a lot recently.) I'm gonna nitpick a little bit because I have different expectations in books than what I saw in Echo. This doesn't mean that it's necessarily a bad book -- I just didn't personally connect with it. I'm sure a lot of people enjoyed reading it. (In fact, it's got close to a 4-star rating on Goodreads, so that's a pretty good indicator that I'm in the minority here.)
I'm also going to go into spoilers to explain some of my frustrations. This is probably also going to talk about stuff established in Fated that I have since forgotten about. I'm not really sure what can be considered spoiler and what can't after all this time.
Anyway, Echo was about as fun to sticky-note as The Selection was. Because I remember so little of Fated, I'm mainly gonna be treating the book as its own entity as opposed to a sequel. I was only 5 sticky notes short of how many I used for The Selection, and that's mainly because those 5 were still stuck in Altered. (I had to pilfer one of them.) I have typed up all my sticky notes the same way I did for The Selection, which you can see here. Unfortunately, there is also more of questioning the methods of how the book was written, not just the characters' decisions. I'll talk about that a little more below. The Google Spreadsheet has some spoilers, so please keep that in mind!!
First up, Echo probably has the fastest buildup to a sex scene I have ever seen in a book. Seriously, it's only on page 42. I know that there's more of a precedent because of Fated, but still, not quite what I expected. It's only about a page and it's not too graphic, and part of me wants to give the book credit for being sex-positive and that nobody shames Daire for expressing her sexuality, but jeez. Also, I'm pretty sure Dace and Daire are both sixteen, and on page 204 (at least a few weeks later) that it was their six week anniversary. That is really quick in a relationship, imo. Take this as you will, considering I am hella asexual and I'm making no assumptions that my peers are anywhere near as chaste as I am. But still.
Let's also talk about the wonderful ground Dace and Daire have built their relationship on, as well as both of their family histories. Paloma reveals to Daire that Dace was born the same day as her, and did Daire know that? No. She had sex with a boy before she even knew his birthday. They both rush into danger trying to "protect" the other, when in reality they just both jump straight into the fire because they're trying to do the same thing and both manage to fail at it. Seriously, the plot would be vastly different if they sat down to talk out their plans and not just pull some "stoic hero" move. They're willing to admit their undying love and sacrifice their lives for the other before their six week anniversary. I feel like that's toeing a little too close to Romeo and Juliet.
Yes, I understand that there have got to be couples like this that exist in real life. Do I think they make for good protagonists? No. Not really. I think the adults in the story need to talk a little more sense into them. It really came off to me that the adults are letting them be all Romeo and Juliet-like because of this prophecy, that their thought process is "well they're fated to be together, let's not give them any well-meaning talks that we would give to any other couples their age".
Jennika (Daire's mom) does give her the sex talk and "there are better fish in the sea" quip, which Daire just brushes off, essentially because "Jennika doesn't understand." And that really frustrates me. Yes, this is stereotypical teenage behavior. Jennika also makes a very good point, because she was sixteen when she became pregnant with Daire, so I feel like Jennika has every right in the world to lecture her daughter about the fact that she slept over at her boyfriend's house. Based on the fact that Jennika and Chepi (Dace's mom) were both sixteen when they became pregnant, I am honestly betting on the fact that it should happen to Daire as well; there is no indication that they took precautions. Honestly, if nothing else, Jennika should have punished Daire for sleeping at Dace's without letting anyone know where she was. Letting your mom and grandmother know where you are is kind of common courtesy so they're not staying up all night worrying about your safety.
On a slightly related note, neither Dace nor Daire refer to their parents as "mom" or "dad". It makes sense for Dace's father since he is nowhere near a father figure, and I guess for Jennika since she tries to come off all "cool mom"-like, but I feel like Dace isn't giving Chepi enough respect by calling her by her first name. Daire also refers to her grandmother by her first name Paloma, which stuck out to me. I guess it's because they never had a relationship before the beginning of Fated. I don't know.
I honestly don't feel like I can comment on the plot much, because for the life of me I cannot remember how it connects back to Fated. I have to give the narration credit for giving enough rehash information so I wasn't totally lost. (That might be annoying if you remember Fated better than I do. There's a good amount of explanations the first couple chapters.) The plot moved fast enough that I never really got bored, and I'm not sure that there were really any "down" points, because if they weren't facing the main issue, they were dealing with melodrama. If anything, I'm going to speak on the fact that Dace and Daire have terrible listening and problem-solving skills, as well as being pretty insubordinate. I have to give all the adults credit for not just locking them up in a jail cell somewhere, prophecy be damned, and solving the problem themselves.
I think that's all I have to say on the characters. I realize that characters reflect conscious decisions on the author's part, so I try to judge them on their own, as if they were real people. Here comes the harder line to toe: narration.
I'm gonna say that these are my opinions as a reader and not really as anything negatively reflecting directly on the author. These are also my criticisms because of what I've learned as a writer myself and what I've noticed in my own writing in the past. I know that writing is a super hard and complex thing to tackle and that everyone does it differently, and I'm trying to keep that in mind in my review.
Echo switches to alternating narration 81 pages in. I questioned why Allegiant added in Four's point of view when the first two books were only in Tris', and I still cannot really figure out why Dace's point of view was added other than the fact to show them both making the same stupid decisions. I get that they're lovesick; I don't think too much was added with Dace's narration. I mean, it did allow more coverage of what was going on in the story, but I don't think that the story would have really suffered by only having Daire's. (I honestly have no idea if Fated used different POVs per chapter. I may be completely off the mark here, and if I am, ignore all this.)
There is also almost no difference in their narration. I am very glad that their chapters are labeled, because I remember Allegiant's weren't. (Maybe I was wrong. It's been a while since I read that, too.) The only thing that tipped me off when I picked the book back up again was who the character were with or if they were pining over the other person. (This would be harder if they were a same-gender couple. They tended to leave off the other person's name, it felt like, leaving only he/she.)
There is also no difference in how anyone really talks, except Lita and maybe Xotichl. Dace and Daire tend to fall back on the oh-so-eloquent insult of "freak" when referring to Cade, and I noticed that Paloma and the other adults seemed to do the same thing with incomplete sentences that Daire (and therefore Dace) did in their narration. Some of it I could write off as how the characters perceived them--maybe Daire just processes everything all broken up like that, I don't know--but it was hard for me to believe that Dace would think in the same way.
My caustic remark causing Xotichl to pat my arm in an attempt to calm me, and Paloma to flash me a look that tells me that while she forgives my mood, she's not about to answer my question until I get a hold of myself. pg 64
Some of the sentences like this are easy to excuse, because I tend to write like this occasionally, too. However, there's a difference between using this effectively and abusing it. I don't think it was used effectively at all. Sentences like this don't make sense, and when you drop the topic or the verb off the sentence too many times, it can get annoying pretty quickly. (I was pretty patient, because I know that I still sometimes fall victim to writing like this. I try not to.) Leaving the topic / verb off back-to-back sentences breaks up the narration and can make it confusing as to what the narrating character is referring to.
I opened the book to a fairly random page (a little hard with how many sticky notes I have) to find a different example.
I yank hard on the wheel--this ancient heap of rust and metal predates power steering by a decade. About to pull onto the street, when Daire's grandmother comes through the painted blue gate and looks right at me.
[Paloma says something]
I shrug. Rub my thumb over the wheel. [...] pg 83
Dace and Daire both narrate like this, and I really wish that there was a better way to immediately tell whose chapter it was, instead of having to rely on who they were with or who they were pining over. Also on this line, there are four new points of view in the "epilogue", each adding about a page of narration. They sound the same, too. Paloma would not narrate the same as Daire!!
Okay. I think that's all I have to say. I actually did enjoy reading Echo enough to finish it, but that was along the same reasons as why I finished The Selection. The book was easy enough to pick up and start reading, but it was almost just as easy to set aside once my computer had finished booting up. I did go out of my way to read it a few times, which is fairly significant. Honestly, it's not a terrible book. It's just really not my thing, and having more experience than the characters (in the form of past books I've read), I feel that I can question the sanity of some of them. Most of them. I am fairly curious as to what happens in the next two books in the series, even if it's just to learn what else Daire and Dace screw up in the future.
This is something related only to the design of the book: if the chapter ended on a right-facing page, the back of it was blank. I went back and counted 20 blank pages that were still included in the page count, which was already about 50 short of what Goodreads told me. There's only maybe 300 pages of content when you include the blank backs and the four ~title pages~ that are two-page spreads.
TL;DR Honestly, if you're not as picky as I am, you might like the book. I did not connect with any of the characters (but I did care for them a little more than I did for Altered), and I wish the narration was better, but I was able to finish the book without a problem. If fated love and preventing world domination is your thing, then hey, go for it. But make sure you read Fated first and remember what's going on so you're not as lost as I was.
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