The Crystilleries of Echoland by Dew Pellucid is a book in which parallel worlds meet in an interesting fantasy story with children teaming up to save the day. I noticed quite a few things that had a strong resemblance to other popular young adult books such as The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman and Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling. The similarities were mainly, but not limited to, each orphan having a pet of some kind as well as many characters being able to turn invisible. It is important to note that the book was extremely well-edited.
Children all over disappeared without a trace and even their parents have no memories of what happened to them. None of the missing children ever return, except for one. This one chid is Will Cleary. Sadly Will does not know where he and the missing children were or how to bring the others back, including his sister. Then one day Will finds himself under attack by Fate Sealers and learns the truth about Echoland, a world parallel to ours.
Will learns that a law was passed in Echoland ruling that if a Sound (someone from our world) dies their Echo must die as well. Will is the Sound to the Prince of Echoland and in an attempt to kill the Prince the Fate Sealers are after Will. Will must return to Echoland in disguise, pretending to be another one of the missing children and live in an orphanage. All so he can work with his Echo to reclaim the throne and abolish the Law of Death.
What I liked best about this book was the concept of our world being the world of Sound and the parallel is that of the Echos. Echoland is a great representation of the opposite of our world. Everything there seems to be colder and duller than our world making it feel like a shadow or Echo (which I imagine was the author's intention). What I didn't like was that I frequently found the book to be dry and boring. At times it felt like it stalled out completely. There were also multiple areas where the writing felt slightly out of order or choppy. I wish I could explain just why the book came across this way, but I am unsure.
It appears this book was written for slightly younger readers. Middle school to early high school students would probably find this book enjoyable. It falls clearly in the fantasy category and is a relatively easy read. I rate this book 3 out of 4. Ordinarily, I would enjoy a fantasy or young adult book, yet I was unable to get into this one. This may have been due to the writing style or the way the plot was confusing and dragging. Most likely it was a combination of both. For a fantasy book, it was not engaging at all. I was going to rate it a 2 out of 4 however since I can not explain exactly what it is that caused me to feel like something was "off" about this book I can not take points away from it.
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