The Storm of Echoes
by Christelle Dabos
translated by Hildegarde Serle
2021
The Storm of Echoes is the last book in Christelle Dabos's Mirror Visitor quartet. When I started the series, I expected it to be a supernatural romance, and the first two books made it seem that perhaps we were watching Ophelia's long, arranged engagement to Thorn either because we were going to watch them fall in love despite themselves, or because she was going to reject him in favor of a real romance of her own choosing. Instead, what happens is that the pair, and Ophelia especially get caught up in events related to the fate of their world, and that is what the latter half of the series is about. By the time they realize they love and trust each other, it's clear that the stakes are so much higher than that by now.
Ophelia's world is a New World made of of 'arks,' islands of land amidst a sea of fog, that remain in position relative to each other just as they were in the Old World, when the Earth was still a whole intact planet. Each ark is ruled by a giant, supernatural Family Spirit, and is home to great extended human families who all posses Family Powers that derive from the spirit.
Ophelia is from Anima, where everyone has powers that animate or interact with objects. Ophelia can 'read' the history of anything she touches with her bare hands, and pass through any mirror to arrive at another nearby. Thorn is from the Pole, where everyone is some kind of psychic. Thorn can inflict pain, others create illusions, others are telepathic. The first two books take place at the Pole, in the frozen cold, amidst the courtly intrigue.
But by the end of the second book, we've learned that God, who sundered the Earth an turned it into the New World, who created the family spirits and gave everyone their powers, God is on a mission to take away everyone's free will, while God's mysterious counterpart, the Other, is loose in the world, causing it to fracture even more. And somehow Thorn is on a personal mission to stop them, so Ophelia, who as I said, has finally, voluntarily become Thorn's wife and ally is on a mission to help him. So books 3 and 4 take place on the ark of Babel, where the locals have supernaturally powerful senses.
The pacing of all this is strange! Things that seem like foreshadowing don't always foretell much, other developments arrive unexpectedly. But I'll say this for Dabos, she never ceased to surprise me, never gave me expected plots or cliche characters. The familiar names create a sense that you might know these people or understand what they'll do, but that's belied by the winding and dream-like nature of the plots.
In each volume, Ophelia ends up trapped, in disguise, undercover, in sort of perilous situation. This time around, she's in a sort of mental asylum for 'inverts.' At the end of the previous book, Ophelia learned that the mysterious God is really children's author Eulalia Gonde, who described the New World and Family Spirits in a book that was written before the Rupture. Ophelia somehow has access to some of Eulalia's memories, and enters the asylum, where Eulalia once stayed, to try to learn more about the past.
At the start of this book, the whole world is being shaken by echoes and by more and bits of the arks vanishing into the misty void. Babel responds by preparing to expel all its immigrants. Staying in the asylum is the only way for her to stay on the ark. Ophelia's inversion dates back to the time when, as a child, she got stuck in the space between while traveling between mirrors. Ophelia has begun to suspect that she somehow released God's Other when she got free, and hopes that experiencing more of Eulalia's memories will help her understand. And Thorn is there, in disguise as an inspector evaluating the care given in the asylum. But while she's trying to use the asylum, it's using her too, and the treatments are making her clumsiness and inversion worse.
What happens next would be hard to explain, but by the end, Ophelia has learned even more secrets about God and the Other, about the Rupture and the nature of the world, and she even gets to see a glimpse of what her life would've been like if she'd never got stuck in the mirror. She and Thorn both have visited the strange, languageless, color-reversed world on the Wrong Side of the mirror. And there's a climactic confrontation with the author of all the world's miseries, and some painful sacrifices needed to save what can still be saved.
This is not a Harry Potter pastiche; not a Twilight retelling, supernatural romance, or romantasy; and any early resemblances to other stories mostly serve to lull you into a false sense of familiarity that will only make the strange, fever-sleep qualities of the story seem all the more surprising. In both plot and mood, Dabos has created something really new.
Ophelia's world is a New World made of of 'arks,' islands of land amidst a sea of fog, that remain in position relative to each other just as they were in the Old World, when the Earth was still a whole intact planet. Each ark is ruled by a giant, supernatural Family Spirit, and is home to great extended human families who all posses Family Powers that derive from the spirit.
Ophelia is from Anima, where everyone has powers that animate or interact with objects. Ophelia can 'read' the history of anything she touches with her bare hands, and pass through any mirror to arrive at another nearby. Thorn is from the Pole, where everyone is some kind of psychic. Thorn can inflict pain, others create illusions, others are telepathic. The first two books take place at the Pole, in the frozen cold, amidst the courtly intrigue.
But by the end of the second book, we've learned that God, who sundered the Earth an turned it into the New World, who created the family spirits and gave everyone their powers, God is on a mission to take away everyone's free will, while God's mysterious counterpart, the Other, is loose in the world, causing it to fracture even more. And somehow Thorn is on a personal mission to stop them, so Ophelia, who as I said, has finally, voluntarily become Thorn's wife and ally is on a mission to help him. So books 3 and 4 take place on the ark of Babel, where the locals have supernaturally powerful senses.
The pacing of all this is strange! Things that seem like foreshadowing don't always foretell much, other developments arrive unexpectedly. But I'll say this for Dabos, she never ceased to surprise me, never gave me expected plots or cliche characters. The familiar names create a sense that you might know these people or understand what they'll do, but that's belied by the winding and dream-like nature of the plots.
In each volume, Ophelia ends up trapped, in disguise, undercover, in sort of perilous situation. This time around, she's in a sort of mental asylum for 'inverts.' At the end of the previous book, Ophelia learned that the mysterious God is really children's author Eulalia Gonde, who described the New World and Family Spirits in a book that was written before the Rupture. Ophelia somehow has access to some of Eulalia's memories, and enters the asylum, where Eulalia once stayed, to try to learn more about the past.
At the start of this book, the whole world is being shaken by echoes and by more and bits of the arks vanishing into the misty void. Babel responds by preparing to expel all its immigrants. Staying in the asylum is the only way for her to stay on the ark. Ophelia's inversion dates back to the time when, as a child, she got stuck in the space between while traveling between mirrors. Ophelia has begun to suspect that she somehow released God's Other when she got free, and hopes that experiencing more of Eulalia's memories will help her understand. And Thorn is there, in disguise as an inspector evaluating the care given in the asylum. But while she's trying to use the asylum, it's using her too, and the treatments are making her clumsiness and inversion worse.
What happens next would be hard to explain, but by the end, Ophelia has learned even more secrets about God and the Other, about the Rupture and the nature of the world, and she even gets to see a glimpse of what her life would've been like if she'd never got stuck in the mirror. She and Thorn both have visited the strange, languageless, color-reversed world on the Wrong Side of the mirror. And there's a climactic confrontation with the author of all the world's miseries, and some painful sacrifices needed to save what can still be saved.
This is not a Harry Potter pastiche; not a Twilight retelling, supernatural romance, or romantasy; and any early resemblances to other stories mostly serve to lull you into a false sense of familiarity that will only make the strange, fever-sleep qualities of the story seem all the more surprising. In both plot and mood, Dabos has created something really new.
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