Echoes - ISBNLookup.com

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The bracing sea air brings little pleasure to the year-round residents of Castlebay, a village on the coast of Ireland, where class lines are strictly observed and morals publicly monitored. The youngest daughter of a shopkeeper whose meagre living depends on summer trade, Clare O'Brien is determined to move beyond her present circumstances. Hard work and the guidance of an irreverent, caring schoolteacher bring the resolute scholar to a college in Dublin. There, her steps falter when she enters into an ardent affair with David Power, the son of Castlebay's only doctor and another willing exile. Although David returns her love, their devotion is sorely tested when they are forced to marry and return home. As a wealthy, new-fledged doctor, David easily resumes his privileged position, but Clare is trapped between her mother-in-law's cold fury and the town's unease. Sharply drawn, memorable characters and a convincing picture of a small Irish community bring freshness and zest to a familiar tale. Binchy also wrote Light a Penny Candle.

Library Journal

This romantic melodrama, set in an Irish seaside town in the Fifties and early Sixties, is as wholesome and engaging as the author's first novel, Light a Penny Candle LJ 2/15/83. Memorable characters include a poor shopkeeper's daughter who wins a university scholarship, only to miss final exams by a cruel twist of fate; a medical student who shocks his family by marrying "beneath him''; a lonely schoolteacher who guards two scandalous secrets about her local celebrity brother; and a kindly, ubiquitous priest who knows all, tells nothing, and holds everyone together. It's a little slow to get into, but by the halfway mark the reader is fully involved in all the subplots and is turning pages nonstop. Recommended for most public libraries and for YA collections. Literary Guild alternate. Joyce Smothers, Ocean Cty. Lib., Toms River, N.J.

New York Times Book Review

Echoes, set in Ireland, is a lovely, ''soft'' book. Maeve Binchy, has written a languid tale set 30 years ago about the people who live in the claustrophobic seaside resort of Castlebay....The Castlebay Maeve Binchy creates is a marvelous place to visit - it's the living there that's hard.