5/20/2023 0 Comments Echo mountain lauren wolk![]() ![]() Ellie was just a young child when the stock ![]() ![]() Set in a Depression-era Maine, it’s about the stories other people tell us about ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and why sometimes kids are the ones that have all the answers. But her latest Echo Mountain trades in that sense of anxiety, exchanging it for mere high tension. You have no idea what to expect when you pick one up. In the past I’ve approached her books the same way you’d approach a sleeping panther. Nobody conjures up the feeling of pine needles under your bare feet or that wind that seeps into your bones quite like she does. More, when I read a book by Wolk, what I yearn for isn’t history. It’s not that her books aren’t beautiful and it’s not that they don’t bring a specific historical moment in the past to life. They may have different reasons for doing so, but in the end there’s a kind of yearning worked into the fabric of the novel for a time that is not the present. ![]() Sometimes such books romanticize history or historical moments. Seems it only really comes up in conversation when you’re talking about works of fiction set in the past. I’ve been thinking a lot about that word lately. How it plays a role in the books we review and the way we interpret those titles. Sometimes we reviewers talk about “nostalgia”. Dutton (an imprint of Penguin Random House) ![]()
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