Ms. Block has written yet another story that amazed me. The sex, the drugs, the music, the fairy-tale aspects…anything and everything I want in a story. No real plot, just a sequence of events.
Echo is the daughter of an angel and an artist. She eats burritos in her car, goes to clubs where vampires scream into microphones, and one night at the beach she decides she likes water better than land and nearly drowns herself. Echo is rescued by a silent boy who lives in an abandoned life guard post, and who is only the first of her many acquaintances. The work is full of description (lots and lots and lots of adjectives, tons of fragments) and characters and just plain weirdness. A fairy with a bone disorder, a father reincarnated as a horse, one angel who plays with crystals and another who won’t touch anyone, vampires at a health club, and the list goes on. Echo lives her life in LA and NY, surrounded by dozens of fairy tales and trying to make her own turn out right.
Like “Weetzie Bat” and “I Was A Teenage Fairy”, “Echo” dumps fairy tale qualities into the ordinary world as if it were absolutely commonplace. It has more in common with “Weetzie Bat”’s storytype than “IWTF”, with a looser poetry-like prose than the latter. Like “IWTF”, “Echo” is best if read several times in quick succession to better understand the story. It’s easier to catch subtleties (and sometimes whole sections of seemingly pointless but vital prose) if you reread immeadietely. I read this book in less than an hour. If you set aside an afternoon, you should be able to pack in a good three or four readings and a great experience. My only problem was that Ms. Block’s florid style, very much her trademark, sometimes gets in the way of comprehension and negates those extra reads.
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