The Echo Maker

By: Richard Powers

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 20 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident - armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness.

©2007 Richard Powers (P)2006 AudioGO

Well written, great narration

I didn't love the story but it was well written and had some really enjoyable sections. The narrator performed beautifully.

Fantastic

Loved this book--the language , plot, twists and turns. Narration was great! Ms. Dunne's voice was easy to listen to and her voice fit the characters.
I think Richard Powers is one of my current favorite authors.

Too much technical science

The story line is great! I feel like the author did a lot of research on the character’s condition and shared way more of it than I cared to hear in a book I’m reading for entertainment. I did like the story line and felt it’s could have been condensed and would not have lost integrity.

Flight of Ideas would be a better title

Richard Powers' prose and character development show up very strong as usual. However, I found the story line very disjointed, and if asked what the book was about I would be hard pressed to come up with a reasonable answer.

That said, Bernadette Dunne's narration was masterful.

Too much time for a boring story

A Group infatuated by cranes, a main character who is an ill-tempered, silly girl incapable of making a decision and a delicate flower, so easily offended; and a brain damaged young man who is the sanest of the group.

Like it yet? Ready to waste 21 hours listening to an entitled woman demand and explode when individuals doing her a favor miss a detail? If you are, this is the book for you.

Oh yeah, did I mention her devoted, doormat boyfriend who possibly likes men and animals in a conjugal way? I spent way too many hours with this cast of shallow soul searchers 'finding themselves" in every other chapter.

So poetic

I loved the thematic breadth acheived by the interweaving of the narratives— the stories of the inner and exterior lives of the neurobiologist, the patient, the sister. As in real life, their disparate and trivial narratives find wholeness and welcome, even meaning, in the vast inconceivableness of nature. My second read by Richard Powers. Looking eagerly forward to the next!

Brilliant

A profound and poetic examination of the human condition and the illusion of the self.

I wanted to like this book

Sigh. I wanted so much to like this book. I love long books with multiple story lines. I am a special educator, so I am fascinated by neuroscience. I enjoy books which provide vivid visual descriptions which draw you into the setting. But good grief, enough is enough. The character can't just be alone with her thoughts in the hospital lobby, we have to know all her thoughts, have all those thoughts analyzed AND know the chair she is sitting in is apricot colored leather. It actually has an intriguing story line and the author writes dialog especially well. But is is so dense in detail and in internal monologue, analysis of characters thoughts and actions, the history of psychology and neurology, plus the endless musing about cranes. I almost gave up several times, but finally finished. It left me vaguely unsatisfied. Not time wasted, just wish it was better. I don't know how much of this is because I listened to it on Audible instead of reading. The narrator had a quiet calm voice that seemed to make the endless detail worse

Couldn’t get through it

Ezra Klein thoroughly recommended this book but I really didn’t like it. I loved the overstory so I was disappointed. Maybe I’ll try it again a little bit later but I had to stop reading it just didn’t like the persons voice didn’t think they really understood how women think or at least the women he had in his story. Yeah, didn’t turn me on.

Endless

I could not finish this book. It is about 200 pages too long. I couldn't even care about the characters after endless minutiae of their lives. Just wanted to find out the main plot line which was no surprise as there was endless foreshadowing. Basically a waste of time. The narrator did a good job though.