Review: Echo by Alicia Wright Brewster

Echo
By: Alicia Wright Brewster
Publisher: Dragonfairy Press
Published: April 25, 2013
Genre: YA Sci-Fi
Rating:

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The countdown clock reads ten days until the end of the world. The citizens are organized. Everyone’s been notified and assigned a duty. The problem is . . . no one knows for sure how it will end.

Energy-hungry Mages are the most likely culprit. They travel toward a single location from every corner of the continent. Fueled by the two suns, each Mage holds the power of an element: air, earth, fire, metal, water, or ether. They harness their powers to draw energy from the most readily available resource: humans.

Ashara has been assigned to the Ethereal task force, made up of human ether manipulators and directed by Loken, a young man with whom she has a complicated past. Loken and Ashara bond over a common goal: to stop the Mages from occupying their home and gaining more energy than they can contain. But soon, they begin to suspect that the future of the world may depend on Ashara’s death.

Asha lives in a sci-fi world where humans have elemental powers. In some cases those elemental powers overtake the human, turning them into killing machines called Mages. However, Asha’s world has a time limit of only 10 days.

I liked the idea of the novel. You have the elementals, the seers (who see the demise of the world), the mages and the time rewinding. It was really cool and original with the whole rewinding of time to try to save the world. Only a select few (those who preform the rewind ritual) actually remember everything that happens. However, for everyone else, their yesterday was actually 9 months ago. Every time they fail to save the world before their allotted time is up, they preform the ritual and start all over again.

I also liked the characters in this story. You follow Asha as she becomes integrated in a unit who’s purpose is to take out mages. She not even sure why she’s part of the team since she has no idea how to use this so called power she has. However, pretty soon she learns to harness her new found power and with help from her other teammates and ex-boyfriend (who’s also the team leader) dispatch the mages in the area.

Even though I enjoyed the story, I did have some hiccups with the progression of it. I found it to be quite slow moving considering the urgency of the matter at hand. They have 10 days to save the world and for some reason I just didn’t get that from the story. It isn’t until the last few chapters that I felt the clock ticking and things started to speed up for me. Once everything starts turning chaotic and everyone is scrambling around, that was when I was really invested in the story. Regardless, I still enjoyed the author’s writing and was entertained throughout the story.

“It was so famniliar, and at the same time, so refreshing. I’d missed the taste of him over the past months. Everything had fallen apart when the Vision came down. And then Pace had died, and I’d refused to even talk to Loken about it. So many things between us.

Now there was nothing except him and me.”

Alicia Wright Brewster is a mild-mannered lady of average height and above average paranormal obsession. By day, she works in an office. At night she is an author, an electronics junkie, and a secret superhero.

In her virtually non-existent free time, she loves to read, watch movies, and eat food. She is particularly fond of the food-eating and makes a point to perform this task at least three times per day, usually more.

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