A teen investigates why her late mother was obsessed with a small town in this unsettling and immersive YA novel that poignantly illuminates the traumatizing grip of grief.
"Come and find me." This note from Beck's late mother, "award-winning, relentless journalist" Ellery Birsching, leads the 17-year-old to Backravel, Ariz., a place where memories somehow disappear. This enigma consumed Ellery and became the subject of her incomplete magnum opus. Beck, chasing her mother's legacy, meets Backravel's odd residents, kind people eerily unbothered by their inability to remember their pre-Backravel days. The local treatment center, one everyone in town has visited, is connected to it all. In charge is Backravel's overseer, who claims to have been friends with Ellery but whose daughter, Avery, warns Beck away. So too does a woman in the desert--a woman who knows Beck's mother would have said the same despite the note that drew Beck to the town. But Beck won't leave. "The ghost of Ellery Birsching lingers at her back... asking her to dig deeper."
Where Echoes Die by Courtney Gould (The Dead and the Dark) has an uncanny atmosphere, like a reverie spliced with reality. Backravel is magnetically chilling, with its ever-present mechanical hum and hazy overlay, its sky "stale blue" as though centuries old. Beck's vulnerable third-person narration demonstrates how traumatic grief entraps; "her memories slide up behind her, threatening to swallow her whole." Her investigation (and queer romance with Avery) can either bring her to healing--or she can succumb to the strange power of Backravel. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer