Jodi Taylor continues her frantic race up and down Time while Max struggles with an emotional seesaw in her second book, A Symphony of Echoes, in her Chronicles of St. Mary’s. We start off with Max and best friend Kal jaunting off to late Victorian London to see Jack the Ripper. Unfortunately they find Jack. And worse, bring it back with them.
Plot
Max deals with Jack for the first quarter of the novel, followed immediately by: Max rescues Leon from dastards who kidnap and bring him to a future St. Mary’s where they also take over and kill most of the personnel (reason hinted at but not really explained), then Max takes over as temporary director of this future unit, visits Mauritius to abscond with some dodos as a works outing, returns home, witnesses Thomas Beckett’s assassination, gets incandescently angry with Leon, wrecks his car and drives it into the lake (necessitating tens of thousands worth of repairs), gets stranded in Nineveh, gets rescued, reconciles with Leon, shoves Mary Queen of Scots into a locked room with Bothwell, and ends with her learning the next mission is to Troy.
Yes, the plot truly is this busy. The emotional highs and lows go along in parallel with the action as Taylor shows us what Max is doing and we see how she reacts to and feels about Leon and her friends. This is a book you read for the plot more than for the people.
There are plot weak spots. For example, why would someone select Jack the Ripper/Victorian London when they can choose any time or place?
And why would Ronan and accomplices want to capture Max so badly that they first kidnap Leon and leave coordinates on the mirror in the men’s room? I understand one villain hates Max but really, there should be easier ways to get her alone and vulnerable than to go through the fuss of getting Leon.
Max speculates the villains want to control a St. Mary’s point in time in order to have a base of operations; that makes sense but also invalidates kidnapping Leon. They would have to know that the original St. Mary’s wouldn’t abandon Leon without a fight.
Characters
While Taylor shows us Max as a person with emotional depth she leaves most of the other characters less finished. She tells us that Tim Peterson is calm and solid, warm and caring, but we see Tim in relationship to Max, through Max’s eyes. We don’t get to know Tim. We get more acquainted with Leon, but he too remains a bit vague. Taylor concentrates on her plot and Max and everyone else is something more than backdrop and less than a full person.
Max’s reaction when Leon spurns her is overwrought. Max and Leon have gone through some rough spots before but this time she goes up like a rocket and simply cannot stop being angry. Max gives in to temper and severs relations with Leon in the first three books in the series and I think it’s flaw that the author corrects in the later novels. I get tired of Max acting like a kid.
Overall
A Symphony of Echoes is very good, enjoyable, and a very fast read. Don’t budget more than an evening for this despite the length. The story moves so fast that I got caught up in the plot and, to some extent, the characters. The book is plot-heavy, not so much driven by characters as it drives the characters and us readers.
I’ve read all of Jodi Taylor’s novels and this is one of the weaker ones, plot heavy and character light. Mind you I still loved it despite the flaws.
4 Stars (3 Stars if it weren’t so entertaining)
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