{"id":4392,"date":"2022-03-23T05:01:01","date_gmt":"2022-03-23T12:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4392"},"modified":"2022-03-23T05:01:01","modified_gmt":"2022-03-23T12:01:01","slug":"jess-montgomery-the-echoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/jess-montgomery-the-echoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Jess Montgomery: The Echoes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This is the kind of book you read with a lump in your throat.\u00a0 Jess Montgomery\u2019s portrayal of 1920\u2019s Ohio is so deeply felt, so evocative, so redolent of history and memory and shared experience, that to read one of these books is to be completely immersed, while at the same time feeling all of the human experience. Montgomery covers it all \u2013 birth, death and everything in between.\u00a0 This novel seemed to me to be the most focused of her books plot wise, and that seemed to give this story an extra intensity.<\/p>\n

The book opens with a young girl named Esme, as she heads to America and a new life.\u00a0 Montgomery switches narrators throughout, so the book returns to Lily, the sheriff in tiny Kinship, Ohio, who is listening to an old woman explain to her that she\u2019s seen a dead body floating in the pond near her house.\u00a0 While Lily covers the pond in a rowboat there\u2019s no trace of a body and she\u2019s impatient with the woman, whose name is Maybelle and who may or may not have \u201cthe sight\u201d.<\/p>\n

The book then shifts to Lily\u2019s mother, Beulah, who has been keeping a very big secret: Esme is the illegitimate daughter of her son Roger, conceived when he was fighting in France. Because Esme\u2019s French grandmother is dying, she\u2019s sending Esme to the only family she has left.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Beulah has told no one in her family that they should be looking forward to having a niece or cousin joining them.<\/p>\n

Beulah has relied on Maybelle\u2019s son, Chalmer, to facilitate the move, and it\u2019s Chalmer\u2019s family that provides much of the drama in the story.\u00a0 He and his wife Sophie don\u2019t get along; Sophie refuses to let her mother-in-law live in the house; and there are some impoverished and bitter cousins, on the wrong side of a longstanding family feud, working for Chalmer.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a big opening of a new \u201camusement\u201d park scheduled, named in honor of WWI veterans, and Lily and her entire family attend the opening ceremony.\u00a0 The park has been mainly financed and built by Chalmer, and the ceremonies are interrupted by one of his cousins and later in the evening, an even worse tragedy: the body of a woman is discovered floating in the pond, just as Maybelle imagined.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Esme.\u00a0 As she starts on the last leg of her long journey her chaperone leaves her for a moment and she\u2019s kidnapped.\u00a0 So while Lily is investigating the drowned woman\u2019s death, she\u2019s also frantic to discover what happened to her niece, as her mother has finally revealed what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

The true narrative and emotional backbone of the story is Roger himself.\u00a0 He was respected and beloved in town, and many of the men in the story, including Lily\u2019s beau, Benjamin, are veterans who served with Roger.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s Esme, and the connection she brings, and there\u2019s Lily\u2019s friend Hildy, who was engaged to Roger before he left for the war.\u00a0 All of the threads of memory and loss belonging to these various characters wind through the story.\u00a0\u00a0 The connections to Roger are strong or slight, but he\u2019s influenced those he\u2019s left behind in more ways than one.\u00a0 The main connection of course is his mother Beulah, and the ways his loss has affected her life.<\/p>\n

Lily\u2019s feelings are more unresolved than her mother\u2019s, in my opinion, and she\u2019s struggling with them throughout the book.\u00a0 Montgomery is a beautiful writer and one who creates in depth portraits of those she\u2019s writing about.\u00a0 The characters of Lily and of Beulah, in this novel, are the central tentpoles but as with Roger\u2019s absence, there are many tributaries flowing from the connections that Lily and her mother have made in their lives.\u00a0 It\u2019s these connections that move everyone forward.\u00a0 Montgomery creates and writes about community in all its pain, beauty, and necessity.\u00a0 While there are several deaths in the book, the message of community is the one I took with me.\u00a0\u00a0 I can\u2019t recommend this series, and this particular book, more highly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the kind of book you read with a lump in your throat.\u00a0 Jess Montgomery\u2019s portrayal of 1920\u2019s Ohio is so deeply felt, so evocative, so redolent of history and memory and shared experience, that to read one of these books is to be completely immersed, while at the same time feeling all of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[289,10,267,100,805,804],"class_list":["post-4392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1920s-ohio","tag-historical","tag-jess-montgomery","tag-minotaur-books","tag-sheriff-lily","tag-the-echoes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4394,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392\/revisions\/4394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}