Echo after echo

 Being an actor is all about finding keys from the real world that open imaginary locks. 

I've always been fascinated with theater. Mostly musical theater and ballet, for some reason—probably because both involve a lot of music, and I can never get enough of music. But "regular" plays, too. So sometimes I find myself drown to books that are set in theaters. Books that show the blurry lines between the glitter of the stage performance, the hard work that goes into making it true, and the feelings that color both sides of the coin.

Echo After Echo is one such book. So recently, after I found myself thinking about theater a little too much after my player's shuffle decided to feed me every Broadway song in my playlist, I couldn't resist the urge to re-read it.

I remember it as a web of beautiful words and growing suspense, and as I cracked the book open, I realized I barely remembered how the central mystery got resolved. All I could recall about the ending were the emotions there, and the images that accompanied them: snow, city lights, water, blood, keys. Of course, as I actually started reading, the memories of the plot gradually returned, but that didn't make the re-read experience any less enjoyable. The story is told with even more beauty and feeling than I remembered, and also with even more flawed, complicated people who, with precisely one exception, keep showing flashes of raw humanity that makes them immensely sympathetic.

In other words, this is exactly the sort of book I never can help falling in love with, even when I'm already familiar with it.

Despite being marketed as a YA thriller/romance, it reads very much like a NA book for me. Probably because Zara, despite being a senior missing her last year of high school to star in Echo and Ariston, is plunged in an adult situation and surrounded mostly by adult people. The setting leaves little room for the usual YA tropes. Even the romance (which, on the second read, somehow seemed more prominent than I remembered it), despite being very much a story of first love and self-discovery and getting told largely in a deceptively innocent fashion, doesn't really feel like a first love. Probably because the way Zara approaches her relationship with Eli is very much the same way she sees her heroine, Echo, approach her tragic romance: she has already carved the space for this love within her, and now the actual person she's with is filling it up. I promise the result is healthier than it sounds. Or at least, it's as healthy as you can expect from a romance that involves someone who is deeply involved in arts and creativity and telling story. It's real and raw and important for its own sake, but it's also a set of real world keys for the imaginary locks. It's a set of experiences to be used on stage. It's a way to tell a different story.

And this is another thing I really enjoyed about this book: how it handles the intersection between the story it tells, and the story the characters are telling inside the book, the play they're staging, the parts they're making sense of. This is something I always enjoy reading about, because stories have always been such a formative part of my life. The recursive experience of reading about fictional people interacting with their own fictional people helps me make sense of my own relationships with the stories I tell and the stories I consume. And stories are for sure my favorite way to make sense of real life. That "keys and locks" thing works both ways—just like this book shows.