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Echo by Francesca Lia Block
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54358,864 (3.94)9
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HarperTeen (2002), Paperback, 224 pages

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Showing 5 of 5
Well written, but with too much adolescent female angst. I am too old and the wrong gender. ( )
  Darrol | Feb 7, 2009 |
I really, really love this book. It's beautifully written and well put together. Echo instantly became a favourite book character, and her journey made me want to reach in a hold her to my heart.
  deadgirl | Nov 5, 2008 |
Year 11 & 12: Echo is caught at the crossroads of a physical world full of hope and despair and the realm of the supernatural, where young men have wings and skeletons speak. On the way, she is graced by angels and fairies and haunted by ghosts, psychopomps, and vampires. But as Echo falls under the spell of demons who threaten to destroy her, she must ultimately look within to find the strength to survive.
Through shifting points of view, Francesca Lia Block weaves pure magic into this deftly constructed tale -- a novel told in the form of linked stories. One girl's life emerges from a tapestry of voices, lives, and loves -- lost and found -- that deliver her finally to herself, triumphant, ever-changing. ( )
  mcgarry | Nov 26, 2007 |
Rather confusing, very adult novel about a girl called Echo who resents the fact that her mother is perfect and that her father loves her mother more than her. At various stages Echo has anorexia, becomes a gym junkie, takes drugs and leads a very hedonistic lifestyle. It is set in the materialistic world of L.A. This is an adult novel containing masturbation, threesomes, lesbianism and stripteases and I disagree with the author’s premise that parents should love their children more than each other. Not recommended.
  nicsreads | Mar 26, 2007 |
This book angered me as few have. It takes the most emotionally screwed up girls, the ones who cover themselves with make-up and cut themselves and stop eating and run away from home and screw everyone in their path, and turns them into objects of incredible romance. Reading this, I LONGED to be those girls. Its magical realism does not use its quirks to highlight truer-truths, but to obscure basic facts of living. As an impressionable and frequently overly-sensitive person, it threw me into a three day funk. Why don't men with angel wings taped to their backs carry ME from the night ocean? Why don't *I* fuck rock stars and call great clouds of blackbirds to flock my house? Why am I so BORING? WHY IS LIFE SO BORING?

I recognize the desire for escapist literature, and I recognize I might have been a little beyond crazy when I read this book. I even recognize that, for what it is, it's lovely writing. But it's also lies, lies in the truest sense, lies that take away from the healthy, beautiful, cotton-and-denim reality. This book would have hurt me even more if I'd read it ten years ago, when I "should" have.

Of course, if anyone that age is reading this, this'll probably make them want to rush right out and read it. That's cool. But it's still a crock of shit. ( )
1 vote ignorantleafy | Sep 26, 2006 |
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Dedication
First words
My father calls her The Angel.
Quotations
I sat at a tiny desk cataloguing and filing papers for the owner, Iris herself, a petite eighty-year-old actress who liked to waltz down her staircase dressed in her finery from half a century ago. She entertained me with monologues from Shakespeare and stories about the gallery's glory days. The gentle horror-movie actors, ballet gods with feet like hooves, and bohemian queens in long velvet scarves who were her favorite clients.
I'd drive up the canyon road to Valentine's magenta adobe building under the Hollywood sign. In the evening the sky was jewelry colors from the sun and smog and there was a harsh sweetness singeing the air. Bougainvillea, camellias, geranium and hibiscus flamed in the gardens, pinker and redder in the moments before darkness and the impending wash of chilly neon that would make them pale.
L.A. is a beautiful prostitute with bougainvillea-blossom-pink lips, hair extensions to her waist, stiletto heels straining the muscles in her calves. Promising opiate dazzle if you pay her enough. And she doesnt just want money.
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Echo (novel)

Book description

Amazon.com (ISBN 0060281278, Hardcover)

Part myth, part dream, and all enchantment, Francesca Lia Block has blessed her glitter fans with another darkly fantastical tale of Los Angeles, "a city of magicians, movie queens, love-struck clowns." On this particular magic carpet ride, Block follows the sad footsteps of Echo, a Hollywood baby born of a dark-souled artist father and an effervescent mother whose impossible beauty likens her to an angel. Echo, who believes that "the only things I know how to do well are shoplift, kiss and dance," feels excluded from her extraordinary parents' perfect love for each other. So she sets out alone to try and fill the cavernous void inside. During her travels, Echo meets a broken angel, iron-pumping vampires, and the fairy daughter of a rock star. Are these figures real? Echo believes in them, and so will the reader, as Block's melodious prose leaves no choice but to accept them as true. Echo finally finds her own true "love-boy" when she learns to look for love within instead of searching for validation through her drugs of choice: food, sex, or doomed relationships. Told in a myriad of voices that belong to Echo, her parents, lovers, and friends, these interconnected short stories are a visual feast of intoxicatingly hip images where the city of Los Angeles is as much a character as the outrageous people that populate its movie-star mansions. Echo's story of salvation will appeal not only to eyeliner-wearing club kids, but to any older teen who's ever felt insecure and lonely in a world full of kissing couples and Hallmark holidays. (Ages 13 and older) --Jennifer Hubert

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:16 -0400)

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