Echo North has been on my TBR list for so long that I can no longer remember how it came onto my radar. But I can definitely remember why I put it on the list – I’m a sucker for fairytale retellings and Echo North retellings not one, but two fairytales!

Scarred by a white wolf, Echo grows up shunned by everyone in the village except her family. Life is tolerable until her father remarries and seems oblivious to the hatred her stepmother holds for her (which, I don’t get? What happens to all these fairytale dads?). But Echo still loves her dad, and so when he disappears, she makes an agreement with the white wolf of her childhood – she’ll stay with him for a year in exchange for her dad’s safety.

While reading this, I was reminded of East by Edith Pattou, which means that I was incredibly pleased to read the acknowledgements and see that the author had also written East! But this isn’t just a rewriting of the same tale – Meyer has added one more fairytale (I won’t tell you which, it would actually be a spoiler) that changes the ending of the tale pretty dramatically away from East of Sun, West of Moon.

As you may have expected, I adored this book! Even without refreshing myself with the blurb, I would have known that this was a fairytale retelling from very first page because of the language used. I suppose it was due to the similarities the book had with East (I mean, I have reasons why I was reminded of the book) – East started with a discussion of the protagonist’s name, and so did Echo North. Apart from the start, there were several parts in the book that echoed East, most notably when Echo interacts with the wolf.

But apart from that, the story is clearly its own. The house that Echo and the Wolf live in is enchanted but wild, and the year that Echo spent there could have been a story by itself. I was really impressed with how Meyer managed to tie up all the loose ends introduced in this section of the book. And yes, I was very impressed with the ending. At the start of the second half of the book, it felt like Echo was going on another journey, but everything managed to come full circle and I practically just flew through the last few chapters because I needed to find out what was going on.

Overall, this was a beautifully written retelling. I particularly enjoyed the world-building and the magic system, which was layered (that said, every time someone said “oldest magic”, I just thought of the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis). I think that people who love fairytale retellings are going to love this.