Echoes of Us by Joy Jordan-Lake ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

A soaring story of an unlikely friendship of three men and one extraordinary woman and the legacy they built―if their own secrets don’t destroy it.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

October 2024; Lake Union; 978-1662514760
audio, ebook, print (463 pages); historical fiction

I'll start this review by telling you that I absolutely loved this book.  I have to really like a book to give it a 5-star rating but I would give this one 10 stars if it was possible.  It had everything that a great book needs.  It was well-researched, had a fantastic dual timeline and well-written characters.  I got totally immersed in it and when it was finished, I couldn't pick up another book for a few days because this book stayed in my thoughts.   

2022 timeline - Hadley and her sister Kitzie are event planners and have been asked to organize an event at St. Simons Island in Georgia.  It will be a reunion of three very different men who became friends during World War II and started a company together.  The children of the original owners are fighting with each other over who will take control of the company and the company image has become tattered due to the infighting.  This reunion is to remind all of them about the original friends and their reasons for starting the company.  The two sisters manage to bring together lots of pictures and documents from the past but they also find a mystery about the friends that intrigues them involving one brave woman and they work hard to find out more about her.

WWII timeline - The odd friendship is made up of a Tennessee farm boy, a Jewish Cambridge student, and a German POW.  Their friendship was based on a woman whose story tied them together.  All three of the men had varied roles during the war - Will was a Marine, Dov was on loan from England to train pilots and Hans was a deserter from the German Army who was sent to a POW camp on Simons Island.  Their stories were well interwoven with each other and the friendship that they formed was very believable and special.

The story was well written and the two timelines flowed very well together.  When everything came together at the end, it was just perfect.  There was a bit of mystery and a bit of romance but the strongest part of this story was the attention to detail on the characters and their connections to each other.  I love a book where the research is so well done that I learn things that I didn't know.  I had no idea that German subs were lurking in the waters of the Atlantic near the US shoreline and that they managed to destroy several boats. In some of my googling to learn more about this, I found out that in 1941 Germans sank five Allied merchant ships off Georgia shores. Either we never heard about this in school or I wasn't listening that day but I had no idea that German subs were so close to America.

This beautiful book is about bravery, family, and an unlikely friendship that bonded three very different men and one woman for years.   This is the best book I've read in a long time and it will definitely be one of my best books of the year.

Buy Echoes of Us at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

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