“B.E.A.C.H.: Best Escape Anyone Can Have.”
I’ve been promising myself a much-needed trip to a beach. Funny, I can’t seem to find my way to the sand and the sea. (Funny, not funny.) I need an escape right about now. Since I can’t seem to get to the shore’s edge, I decided the next best escape is a R.E.A.D.: Rewarding Escape Anyone (and Everyone) Deserves. It seemed fitting to choose a beach read, and while Emily Henry’s book by the same name came to mind, I went with Barbara Davis this time. (My girl Devron mentioned Davis when I saw her last.) So I downloaded The Echo of Old Books and dove in.
For me, it’s hard to resist a book about books. I appreciated rare book dealer Ashlyn Greer for obvious reasons. Thankfully, she let her superpower—the ability to feel the emotions of previous book owners by simply touching a book’s cover—be her guide. When she stumbles across two leather-bound, self-published books with the same look, her bookish spidey-senses get a pins-and-needles tingle. She uncovers a sad romance rolled into a decades-old mystery. Tired as I am, I did unravel the mysterious part of the novel before it was revealed. No bother. This is a beach read after all. I wouldn’t call The Echo of Old Books “the best escape anyone can have”—but with the sun, a light breeze, and the sound of the ocean as a paradisical backdrop, you’ll enjoy Barbara Davis’s latest. I especially relished the quotes from The Care and Feeding of Old Books at the start of Ashlyn’s chapters; let’s end with one of those: “Books are rib and spine, blood and ink, the stuff of dreams dreamed and lives lived. One page, one day, one journey at a time.”