I was so looking forward to this. I really enjoyed the author's previous novella, Don't Call Me Angel, so when the opportunity arose, I grabbed Echo and eagerly dug in. 
 Yeah, this one did not work for me nearly as well. Not by miles. Kind of hated it. 
 I mean okay, there are a few things I liked about it, and we should probably start with those. The premise is really cool: it's the week before the apocalypse and there's a clock in the sky counting down the moments til the end. Except, it isn't actually the week before the apocalypse, because every time it gets too close and the End hasn't been averted, world leaders are able to rewind time, reset the week, and start again, and they will do this as many times as it takes to save the planet. The citizens know this, and so the ones who aren't needed to save the world stay in their homes and spend time with their families, waiting for their government to give them the all-clear. When first we meet, our heroine is just an ordinary girl in a wonderfully-conceived, terrifying setting, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 
 It's an excellent place to start. It's unique and scary and there are so many interesting places you could go. A+. 
 Second thing I liked was the general sense of community that the book established. The emphasis here, from the setting and the characters, and especially our heroine, is family. There are great scenes where the characters come together and cook and eat and soak in one another's company while they can, and it's the realest thing in the book. It's my favorite thing, to see a heroine whose life and choices are informed by something other than romantic love or destiny. 
 Our protagonist, Ashara, is family-motivated from the ground up. Her inability to protect them is her greatest source of guilt and angst, and her desire to prevent her family from suffering another loss is what motivates her to fight and stay alive. I love that. Not only does she have a sense of self-worth and self-preservation, but it's not because of a boy. 
 There is also a merciful absence of alpha bitches, Ashara has strong bonds and relationships with female characters in the story, and holy crap, a future in which the entirety of the population is not white! We have a black female protagonist! and her Asian best friend! and a multi-racial cast of side characters! HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THIS SORCERY??? 
 So yeah, all good points, all things I liked about it. All things that make me really really wish I'd liked the rest. Unfortunately, 'twas not to be. 
 First and probably biggest roadblock for me was the world-building. I did not buy any of it. It's weird and contradictory and it didn't really hold together, regardless of which way I tried to look at it. It felt like a mish-mash of a bunch of things that seemed cool independently, but just didn't integrate together well enough. 
 So, we've got a sci-fi setting, this book taking place in what is presumably our future, but on a different earth, colonized initially by anti-tech folk who wanted to get back to basics and found a space-Amish community. They were, however, followed shortly by pro-to-neutral-tech folks, and that caused a rift because they couldn't have their nice, tech-free planet all to themselves. All of that is fine and well and I can almost get down with that except that the anti-tech folk, known as Believers, decided immediately upon arrival that their new world's twin suns were actually gods and should be worshiped as such. 
 I don't...believe that? I don't understand why that would ever happen. Like, on earth, ancient people created gods to explain natural phenomenon and I understand why that would take hold and endure, but these "Believers" came to this planet on a rocket ship made of science, they presumably understood that suns are stars and stars are just big balls of hydrogen and helium, and just because this star is one you haven't seen before doesn't make it a mysterious and unknowable thing. They are still fucking stars. 
 I mean, the colonists name them Ra and Solaris and I'm still not clear on whether or not they actually believe the sun is Ra, or if it was just the most popular sun god name when they took the Name Our New God poll. But then, why Solaris? Those two names don't even go together. Why an Egyptian god and then generic Greek sun name? Plus, you'd think that if these people believed they were actual gods, they would invent new names for them or try to discern the names the gods gave themselves, not just slap a handy earth name on to an existing thing. That seems incredibly disrespectful to any pre-existing sentient being much less a deity. 
 This wouldn't make any more sense but I guess you could just write it off as willful human nonsense, except that eventually all this is actually implied to be true. Furthermore, it turns the issue from one of tech vs anti-tech into one of science vs faith, which opens a whole other can of worms, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The other big thing you need to know is that a significant portion of the people on this planet are benders. 
 Yeah almost exactly like that. You have your standard water, fire, air, earth, and metal benders, although they are legally distinctly called Flooders, Burners, Breathers, Movers, and yeah actually literally Benders, respectively. Then there are Ethereals, who manipulate ether, which is basically just generic energy bending, and once again this world mythology is getting muddled. 
 So look, I can handle fantasy aspects in space, I can deal with actual literal deities in space, I can even deal with science and magic existing side by side, but to deal with any of this, I need some consistency. 
 We're told initially that bending is a Totally Normal and Scientific Thing that the characters can do thanks to some aspect of this new planet's twin suns. The most important thing is that it is Totally Science Y'all and is completely unrelated to how those people believe the suns are gods, and we are totally comfortable looking down on their superstitious beliefs because Science. Ok. Fine. Bending is not actually something that sits well with me as a science-based power, even future-science, but fuck it, ok book, disbelief suspended. 
 Book: Cool, glad you're okay with that. So Ether-benders, ether is totally a science thing, right? Also, there are Seers who see the future and actually believe their powers come from the gods, but still work with the Totally Scientific Council, Y'All. Also also, the method that we use to rewind the timeline looks, walks, and talks like a spell, but we're not going to call it that. Look, this is all basically legit fucking magic, but we're not going to address it. Instead, we're totally gonna portray this as scientifically unremarkable, and remain committed to pretending none of this is even within the same realm of possibility as deities. 
 Book: Also in like a hundred pages, with little to no explanation, we're going to tell the heroine that to completely unlock her incredible Ether-bending powers, she has to believe in the gods. Because bending is actually a gift from the gods, you see, and unless you believe in them, you cannot develop this skill that you totally had pre-faith any further. It's impossible. 
 None of this makes any sense. For one, you cannot establish that bending is a scientifically understood phenomenon then ALSO say that it is mysterious and unknowable because faith. It can't be both. One absolutely precludes the other. Secondly, the bending, precognition, and spell-casting? The book never sells that stuff to me as actually being hard science, and it really needs to if it also wants to sell me on this groundbreaking science vs faith conflict that drives an entire subplot. There are totally ways to do that, but rather than developing the Council in that light, the book just used magical cult shorthand, told me it was science, and then expected me not to find that difficult to swallow. 
 Even positing that the Council is flat-out wrong and the Believers are the ones who actually have a handle on things, this world still makes no sense theologically - if bending were going to be a sacred, god-given gift, why would they allow non-Believers to do it at all? What does walling off an ambiguous level of bending prowess achieve? And how does this system even work? Are the gods monitoring every bender on the planet and only unlocking their next power set when they reach the appropriate level of piety? 
 The whole Believe vs Unbeliever conflict makes even less sense from their perspective - the idea is that Believers totally believe that the end is nigh, but they also believe it's the god's will, so the Council shouldn't do anything about it. Then we get scenes like this: 
 "You and I are allies. You see, you may or may not have the power to end things. Most likely, the Vision is a fluke, and there's no end in sight. But either way, this is not something people were meant to interfere in. See--" 
 I cut her off. "I don't understand. Don't you guys care that everything we know may come to an end?" 
 "Should we care?" she asked, with one eyebrow quirked upward. "All things must end. Such is the cycle of nature. If the gods have decided that our time is over, then we should move on to the afterlives they have set for us. The end is not something to fear. It's something to be welcomed." 
 [...] 
 "So if we fight and survive," I asked, "does that mean there are no gods? No one up there preparing to end the world?" 
 "If your people fight and survive, they were always meant to survive, and the Vision is a fluke." 
 [image error] 
 So if the world ends, it was meant to end, and it should end, and you shouldn't try to stop it, but if you DO stop it and it doesn't end, it wasn't meant to end, so I guess you should have tried to stop it, except that I'm literally willing to kill to keep you from stopping it. 
 UGHhhhhhhh everyone in this book is stupidddddddddddddddd. 
 It really seems like the book needed for there to be this Believer vs Unbeliever conflict for the plot to work, but it also needed bending to be an everyone thing, but it also needed a way to gate off the heroine's power until just the last minute, so we get this inconsistent mish-mash of movements and people doing and believing things that don't make logical sense purely because the plot says that this is how it is. 
 "Plot convenience": it's going to be a recurring element in this review. 
 Continue reading at You're Killing.Us