Genre: Contemporary, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Spencer Duran’s birth mother, an underage girl sadly gave him up for adoption. Jillian and Bill Duran soon adopted him, cared for him, and gave him a good solid start in life. Spencer has always longed to find his birth mother, and to ask her why she abandoned him. Before starting college at NAU, he and Jillian stopped at an interesting café in beautiful Sedona. When they finished eating, Spencer first notices a man slightly older than himself. Locking eyes, both men unexpectedly shared an instant unspoken, and unforgettable bond.
Seconds Spencer breaks eye contact, and sees a woman standing by the man’s side and stares in shock; she could be his older female twin. Jillian also sees her and recognizes her. The fear of losing Spencer grips her, and drives her to fake a sudden illness, hurrying him out of the café.
Now over a decade later Jillian is dead, and Spencer receives an astonishing Instagram text from a stranger named Tim. He addresses his text with his given name Spencer, not his social media name. Tim states that he has an urgent message from his mother.
The Review
This is a straightforward “HEA” romance, in which most of the action takes place in a thirty-six-hour period, completed with an epilogue timed six months afterward.
Spencer is a successful m/m romance writer in his early thirties, who informs us of his early life at the start of the book: being turned over to an orphanage as a newborn, moved into foster care, then into an adoptive home, where he grows up. He is living in his adoptive family’s home, financially secure in his career as a writer, but lonely in what he refers to as his “dull life.”
The real story begins when Spence receives a text from a stranger, and discovers that his birthmother (always referred to as his natural mother) has located him and wants to meet. In the span of a day, Spence’s life changes completely, introducing him not only to his mother, Laura, but her friends Minnie and Tim.
The plot is a rapid-fire unreeling of sudden friendship, romance, and maternal love that stirs up childhood memories. The narrative moves among the points of view of all of the characters at one time or another. Including both Laura’s lawyer Gerry and Spence’s best friend Bella. I won’t reveal anything more about the setting, because that is of major importance in the both the story and in Spence’s reaction to the unexpected turn of events.
I think the point of the story is to explore the unfulfilled yearnings that Spencer has carried with him since childhood, and to take the reader through the experiences by which Spencer exorcizes the ghosts of his past.
My major issue with “An Echo of Love” is the author’s writing style. The shifting point of view is not confusing in itself, but the fact that there is no shift in tone from one character to the next can make it difficult to remember who’s speaking. It’s as if the change in character from chapter to chapter is simply switching from one camera to another on a film set. Throughout the text—which is all from a first-person point of view—there is a problem with inconsistent use of tense.
As a longtime gay adoptive father of two now-adult children, I wasn’t entirely sure I liked the way Spence’s adoptive family is portrayed and dismissed. The romantic idea of rediscovering a long-lost birth mother turns adoption into an unhappy consolation prize, something to be survived until real happiness can appear.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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