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Echoes
Echoes
Author: Maeve Binchy
David Power and Clare O'Brien both grew up dreaming of escape from the battered seaside town of Castlebay, but the might as well have had the ocean between them. David is the cherished son of a prosperous doctor, while Clare lives with her large family behind their faltering store, longing for a moment of quiet to study. When they both go to...  more »
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ISBN-13: 9780451225108
ISBN-10: 0451225104
Publication Date: 11/4/2008
Pages: 496
Rating:
  • Currently 3.4/5 Stars.
 52

3.4 stars, based on 52 ratings
Publisher: NAL Trade
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover, Audio Cassette
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

reviewed Echoes on + 44 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 5
I keep telling myself, enough of Maeve Binchy. There's something repetitive and regular about her stories. They're long, reflect the class differences in Ireland, discuss small mindedness of small towns. There's often description of the differences between the small town and city mentality, boys vs. girls, good girls vs. âbadâ girls. She always takes a long approach â following the stories of the main characters over years of change â some change is internal, some is forced on them by outside circumstances.

Yet, I continue to read her books. There's a love of the characters, a sense that these are real people and that she's just relating their life stories. You know what to expect, sort of, but the way she writes is sweet and loving. You can get involved in people's lives â sort of watching through a one way glass â and enjoy their blessings and even their sorrows.

This is an early book â written in 1985. It is lovely, standard Maeve Binchy.
cay avatar reviewed Echoes on + 63 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 4
A story of desolation,determination,and the hard work required to both rise above one's birth circumstances and fulfill one's destiny. The lives of Clare, Angela, and David are intertwined in the small sea side village, but there were proper ways to behave in the late 1950's and early 1960's in Ireland. The book tells what happens when each character's flaws are revealed. This was a great read!
reviewed Echoes on + 10 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 4
Not one of Maeve Binchy's best. A slow read, and not very entertaining.
jessielynn avatar reviewed Echoes on + 79 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 3
One of Binchy's best...love this story.
reviewed Echoes on + 404 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
From Library Journal-
"This romantic melodrama, set in an Irish seaside town in the Fifties and early Sixties, is as wholesome and engaging as the author's first novel, Light a Penny Candle). Memorable characters include a poor shopkeeper's daughter who wins a university scholarship, only to miss final exams by a cruel twist of fate; a medical student who shocks his family by marrying ``beneath him''; a lonely schoolteacher who guards two scandalous secrets about her local celebrity brother; and a kindly, ubiquitous priest who knows all, tells nothing, and holds everyone together.
It's a little slow to get into, but by the halfway mark the reader is fully involved in all the subplots and is turning pages nonstop."
Read All 40 Book Reviews of "Echoes"

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boomerbooklover avatar reviewed Echoes on + 430 more book reviews
Story of people in Ireland in the Fifties. Girl from a poor family works hard for years for an education. Rich neighborhood boy becomes a doctor. I live in a beach area, and enjoyed this story set in a vacation location where life in the summer is entirely different from off season months.
emeraldfire avatar reviewed Echoes on
Clare and David - divided as children by a rigid social code that branded her as shanty Irish and he as gentry class...brought together as adults by a passion that couldn't be denied. It was a desire that knew no class, no barriers, only the urgent hunger of two people destined to love and ready to defy any convention used by a world determined to keep them apart.

Even at fifteen, David Power knew eleven-year-old Clare O'Brien's dearest wish, to win a school prize. But it was years before Dr. Power's cherished only son recognized in the huckster's daughter his own heart's desire. Here in Castlebay, perched precariously on the seaside cliffs, the lines between them were clearly drawn.

Clare's only hope is to leave the town where time stopped, propelled by scholarships to Dublin, fueled by her own drive and brilliance, far from the insular, gossipy world of Castlebay and those held in its thrall...Angela O'Hara - beautiful, insolated, a teacher trapped in the convent school, who risks everything to help Clare escape...Gerry Doyle, the town charmer who finds in Clare the woman he vows to have at any price...Caroline Nolan, the beautiful, rich outsider who comes to plunder.

For Clare, that was before the wild freedom of Dublin, and love. And David. Before fate drove them back to Castlebay, and the past.

I truly enjoyed this book, as I usually do with any book by Maeve Binchy that I read. Reading Maeve Binchy's books, even rereading some of them, as this particular book Echoes was for me, is almost like returning to familiar places and visiting old but very familiar friends. I read Echoes for the first time maybe a decade to fifteen years ago and enjoyed this book then as well. I give this book an A+! and have placed it on my keeper bookshelf to enjoy again at some point in the very near future!
reviewed Echoes on + 92 more book reviews
Love the visit to the Irish village and the characters. It is so easy to become a part of this story and to get lost in the characters and to care. I love this author.
reviewed Echoes on + 6 more book reviews
IT WAS SOMETIMES CALLED THE ECHO CAVE, AND IF YOU SHOUTED YOUR QUESTION LOUD ENOUGH IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION YOU GOT AN ANSWER INSTEAD OF AN ECHO
reviewed Echoes on + 24 more book reviews
Binchy creates characters one cares about. Good story that held my interest.
reviewed Echoes on + 308 more book reviews
love story between classes in a rigid social code
reviewed Echoes on + 13 more book reviews
Loved It!!!


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