Echoes Among the Stones
In Jaime Jo Wright’s haunting Christian thriller Echoes Among the Stones, grief paralyzes a family.
After losing her job and losing her mother to cancer, Aggie moves to Wisconsin to care for her grandmother, Mumsie, who lies and claims that she’s just broken her hip and needs help. Mumsie may be fine on the outside, but her home is a tomb—a tribute to the past, complete with closed rooms and furnishings that haven’t changed in fifty years.
Aggie gets a job organizing cemetery records; they’re in disarray following a flood that pulled bodies and caskets out of the dirt and into the light of day. While straightening them out, Aggie stumbles onto a mystery: someone who died in the 1940s is buried among the graves from the nineteenth century. A parallel narrative set in 1946 sees Imogene dealing with her own set of mysterious circumstances. Her community is recovering from the war, with men returning and finding home life to be a big adjustment.
Things get stranger for Aggie when a skeleton shows up in Mumsie’s backyard and notes are written on rose petals declaring that it’s not over. Enter a handsome English stranger, Collin, who brings excitement and romance.
Clear, evocative descriptions of small-town American life, with its tangled relations and economic postwar struggle, are incorporated. As the novel progresses, Imogene’s story begins to inform Aggie’s, resulting in insights into the stories behind the headstones. The book’s mysteries aside, its central question is one of faith. Both Aggie and Imogene struggle with grief and hope that, by understanding what really happened, they can find justice.
Echoes Among the Stones is a deeply felt novel that mixes suspense with the heartfelt need for healing.
Reviewed by
Jeremiah Rood
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