If you’ve been following along with me on this website at all, you’ve probably run across me saying that Sharon Shinn is an insta-buy for me. She’s such a favorite of mine that to date she is the only author I’ve ever sent a fan letter to, just to tell her how much her characters mean to me. (And I got a letter back, which was a highlight of my life.) So when I found out that she had three new novels all released on the same day but only via Audible? I signed up for Audible again so fast my bank account got whiplash.
Echo in Onyx (2019)
Echo in Emerald (2019)
Echo in Amethyst (2019)
Written by: Sharon Shinn
Narrated by: Emily Bauer
Series: Uncommon Echoes
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 15 hrs 2 min, 13 hrs 21 min, 14 hrs 57 min
Publisher: Audible Studios
Premise:
A murder and a masquerade.
Brianna loves her new job as maid to Lady Marguerite. Like many high nobles, Marguerite is attended by echoes, silent creatures who look exactly like her and move in perfect synchronicity. News soon comes that Marguerite has been invited to the royal city as a potential bride for the crown prince. Brianna is delighted to accompany Marguerite to the city — and perhaps get a chance to continue her own flirtation with Nico, one of the king’s inquisitors.
Then, disaster strikes on the road when they come under attack. The brutal assault forces Marguerite and Brianna to concoct a desperate plan. Their subterfuge just might work — but only if Brianna can keep Nico from learning the truth. And only if Marguerite can give up her own secret, doomed romance.
And all that’s at stake — is the very future of the kingdom.
No spoilers
Discussion: There is always a thing with Sharon Shinn. It’s usually magic of some kind, but this time it’s exact copies that move at exactly the same time as their original, shadows that follow you around a room.
The worldbuilding for a society with echoes was actually pretty interesting. I had a few questions regarding how they handle things like going to the bathroom? But she’d thought through so much, including fancy state dinners and having sex, that not knowing how they handle four people peeing at the same time wasn’t really that much of a loss.
I can’t be the only person that thinks being followed by three silent copies of yourself is actually kind of creepy, but the worldbuilding was so fascinating that I frequently forgot about exactly how creepy that would be.
The first of these books (the plot in the premise above) really does an excellent job building the world and setting up the expectations for the next two. In the first book, Marguerite is remarkable among those with echoes (generally only nobility) because she can allow hers to move independently of her. To Marguerite, they are distinctive enough that she has named them and can tell them apart.
In the second, Chessie, the main character, can throw her consciousness into her echoes. She is hiding from who she is and lives on the streets, and she can’t hide with echoes. Instead, she learned how to switch herself from the original body to the echoes’ bodies, in order to have three distinct people that she styles to look different.
And then in the third, one of the echoes of this absolutely horrible character that you meet in the first book gains consciousness on her own.
So the first really builds the world, the second expands it, and the third completely flips it on its head.
I don’t love the audio medium for fictional works. It’s hard for my brain to follow a plot line when I’m not reading it, though I love short form podcasts and long form non-fiction. Fiction, for some reason, is more difficult. So I do still want to actually read these books when the physical copy comes out. It still hasn’t, Shinn’s website says June but here we are, past that, and they’re still not available (at least on Amazon). But I’ll keep waiting, because dang I liked these.
In conclusion: Good books, and a very solid addition to Sharon Shinn’s bibliography.
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