- Title:
- No True Echo
- By:
- Gareth P. Jones
- Pages:
- 320
- Rating:
- 5
Eddie is pretty certain nowhere could be more small-town, more boring, and more inconsequential than his home town of the Wellcome Valley. Unfortunately, he is about to be proved spectacularly wrong.
Eddie’s problems start when he sees his teacher getting shot (possibly with an elastic band) and then promptly vanish into thin air. Or maybe they start just a little bit before then, with the arrival of Scarlett, a new girl in town who seems rather too confident and mysterious for your average schoolgirl. She attracts trouble (and Eddie) like a magnet, and she’s apparently only interested in two very strange things – protecting the local crackpot scientist, Dr Wolf, and telling Eddie absolutely nothing about what on earth is going on. Because things quickly go from weird to worse for Eddie, and he’s about to find himself in the middle of a dangerous battle for the fate of not just himself, Scarlett and the town – but Time itself.
“So you’re telling me that today is two days ago, tomorrow is yesterday and what was today hasn’t happened yet?”
This is absolutely and without doubt my best time travel book of the year so far. It crackles along at a breakneck pace and has characters both deep and meaningful
“We shouldn’t talk,” said Angus. “Why? Are you worried that we might say something that actually makes sense?”
The complexities of time travel do strain the reader a little, but the fun factor is always there, and the dialogue in the ETA chapter is absolutely priceless (Cornish’s bewilderment is superb). The only slight qualm in an otherwise outstanding novel was the end, which although it succeeds in finishing off the story, somehow seemed to avoid any meaningful resolution in my mind. I can’t deny that the story itself was worth a handful of bad endings, and this one wasn’t bad, just less fulfilling than I’d hoped. Yet this was a powerful, enjoyable, and very entertaining read.