The Echoes of Love - book review

The Echoes of Love is a romantic novel slightly over four-hundred pages long. It has two main characters; a woman named Venetia and a man called Paulo. The story plays out in Venice, so if you would forget about that just think about the main characters name - she is literally named after the city.

The only good thing I can say about this book is that there is a story here! It is hidden behind four-hundred pages of nonsense. For most part of the book we follow the perspective of Venetia, but occasionally we switch over to Paulo and those chapters (more like two to five pages) are worth reading, mainly because we get to know the character just a tiny bit.

There is not much good in this book. It is about a woman who falls for a man but during the first half refuses to accept this because of her past. She got her heart broken by a man who's baby she was carrying and lost. Fast forward ten years. Venetia falls for the well-known playboy. He is creepy and demanding. She is mean and cold-hearted. One scene struck me as unsafe; she wants to go home from a party, he wants to take her. She thanks him but does not want to be escorted, yet accepts his company while she tried to find a taxiboat. Of course she does not and then agrees to join him on his boat. Total stranger. She even accepts a drink which he pours at the boat to calm her down after a pathetic fall! My mind was screaming rape warning but that never happened. He was a sort of gentleman and drove her home and just as she is getting of the boat he grabs her arm and looks her in the eye and demands that she is going to have dinner with him. EVERYTHING in that scene says stay away from this man. Yet she dosen't. Despite having the appropriate thoughts about a man demanding a dinner from her she still meets him later and falls for him. I wonder if she only falls for his looks because the personality is downright despicable.


Not only did the weak story move ever so slowly forward but everything was described into the smallest detail. There is a long description about her apartment; all the way to the bathroom and the tub sitting under the window. One page was for describing how she looked when she woke up in the morning; the hair, the eyes, the arms, the light, the slowly opening of the eyes, the colour of the eyes, the sheets, etc. I had to skip certain pages to survive the endless descriptions over places not important to the story!

The most unbelievable thing the author did was focusing so intently on eyes. I am not kidding you when I say that every time Venetia looks at Paulo his eyes will be described. I found twenty different kinds of blue throughout the book, many mentioned over and over again. The worst thing is that his eyes change colour all the time! I first thought it was because of the lightning and that yes, in the dark blue eyes can appear like midnight-blue and yes, in sunshine they can appear like sky-blue, but in the same scene in the same lightning and room his eyes still managed to drastically change to three different kinds of blue! And I barely remember what the rest of him looks like.

The book is written in English but since it is in Italy everybody speaks Italian of course. This I understood at the very beginning of the book and yet some characters need to first have their sentence written in Italian and then translate what they say to English right after. Are they meant to speak both languages? No, it is just for you as a reader to enjoy learning very specific sentences in Italian if you wish. It was truly annoying and I really did not like having it interrupt my reading.

At the end we finally discover the secret, the mystery of the book. The book ends. There is no further explanation what happens to their romance. There is a short scene when they reunite in the end and they look at each other (he has very blue eyes indeed) and then it ends. There is no understanding what happens after the dark secret has been revealed. Some feelings are mentioned but everything feels abandoned. It was not a very satisfying end to this very boring book. I was glad to be done with it and finally pick up a good book!

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