The Echo Wife (Sarah Gailey)

The Echo Wife
Sarah Gailey
Tor Books
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Dr. Evelyn Caldwell is at the top of her field, developing disposable, purpose-made adult clones for use as organ donors, body doubles, or experimentation, but her personal life is a disaster. Her husband Nathan left her... not just for another woman, but for an illegal clone of herself - one he made by stealing her own theories and works, to add insult to injury. "Martine" is everything Evelyn couldn't or wouldn't be: submissive, dedicated to his every need, and ecstatic about bearing his children - even though her very existence is a crime and her ability to conceive should be impossible. Evelyn does her best to ignore Nathan and his new, false wife... until Martine calls in a panic. The clone made the mistake of questioning her maker, and now Nathan lies dead on the floor. The doctor and the clone now share more than DNA and one unfaithful man. They share a very big problem, one that's only going to get worse.

REVIEW: The Echo Wife re-imagines the moral dilemmas of Frankenstein with a dash of The Stepford Wives. The product of an abusive marriage, Evelyn vowed never to follow in her cruel father's footsteps or her mother's cringing shadow, even as she develops the detachment that lets her create and dispose of what are essentially living, breathing human beings with as little care as a farmer harvesting and cracking eggs... a detachment that Martine challenges in numerous ways. While she is the living embodiment of her failed marriage and everything Nathan wanted her to be - someone so fundamentally not who she is that it was clear their marriage was doomed from the start - she also upends nearly everything Evelyn has ever believed about her own cloning projects, as she grows beyond her programming. The tale wends and wanders (and I do mean wends and wanders; Gailey never says in a sentence what she could say in a paragraph or more, which often goes beyond merely adding atmosphere into numbingly over-descriptive navel gazing) down ever-darker paths, as Martine struggles with the limits of her existence and Evelyn struggles with her own shifting understanding of what she helped create (even though Nathan stole her research, the breakthroughs were hers), always warring with the inner voices of her abuser father and victim mother and her innate tendency to reduce human beings to clinical problems to be solved or simply ignored. It dropped in the ratings for the aforementioned wandering and an ending that offers no hope on any level whatsoever. The Echo Wife may be an intriguing exploration of identity and ethical conundrums and the long, inescapable shadows cast by abuse, but I ultimately found it far too meandering and wordy and just plain depressing.

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