Book Review: Echoes

Echoes by Robin Jones Gunn

Lauren Phillips seems to attract disaster - falling into tables full of food, getting a bad perm - but she wasn't expecting her fiancee, Jeff, to leave her.  She wasn't expecting her "happily ever after" to not even start.  Depressed and lonely, Lauren turns to her new computer and starts up an email pen-pal relationship with a man she only knows as KC.

Using the online name of "Wren," Lauren and KC quickly find many things in common and almost as quickly fall in love.  When the chance to meet "ILR" (in real life) comes up, can Lauren overcome her fear of abandonment and take the leap?  Or will her trepidation take over and force her to lose the love of her life?

My Thoughts:

I'll start out by saying that once I got half-way through this book, I couldn't put it down.  I had to find out if they got together in the end.  Echoes reminded me of a Karen Kingsbury kind of book where you can predict what's going to happen but you want to keep reading just to make sure it does happen.

That being said, I had a few annoyances with Echoes.  The book is centered on Lauren's e-mail relationship with KC, but the computer terminology used is ancient.  Instead of saying "email address", Lauren talks about finding KC's "number" to send him messages.  That confused me.  I don't even remember using that term when I first heard about email.  After reading conversations in the book about how new email and the Internet were, I went to the front and checked the copyright date -1996.  Yup, the Internet and email were new then.  Knowing that put things in a little better context.

Also there were characters introduced in the book that just kind of disappeared part way through the story and I really didn't know why they were brought in there.  I'm sure the author had a reason; I just couldn't figure it out.

I'd also like to point out that this is the 3rd book in an eight book series called The Glenbrooke Series.  I have not read any of the other books in the series.  Because of that I didn't know the back story of some of the characters but it didn't detract from this story in any way.  This book could definitely be read on its own without reading other books in the series.

I would categorize this as is a cute, romantic book, something that doesn't make you think too hard to read it.  These kinds of books are great to read when you just want to escape.  If you are looking for something current or deep, I would look elsewhere.

I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.

I received a complementary copy of this book for review while participating in the Blogging for Books program.  All opinions are my own.