This is a very different way of writing a book but very interesting. It is written in the past by different people and in the present. Very creative way of writing. The story spans across many decades and is a great story of love and loss. Ashlyn Greer, a book dealer, finds a set of old books and has the ability of psychometry, the ability to discover facts about an event or person by touching the book. She gets a lot of feelings from the two books which leads her to investigate what really happened to the authors of the books. I highly recommend the book. ( )

Ashlyn Greer is a rare-books dealer who is able to feel the emotional fingerprints of the books' previous owners. She discovers two beautifully and similarly bound volumes that were never published. Each is inscribed by its author (Henri and Belle) with an incriminating statement that tells of a romance gone very wrong. This book tells the story of Ashlyn's quest to find out who these authors are or were. ( )

When bookseller Ashlyn Greer comes into possession of a pair of twin books with no known author or publisher, their stories compel her to track down their mysterious origins. Told in two perspectives—Hemi and Belle’s—the story unfolds of a journalist seeking the truth about a powerful man during wartime and the daughter of the man being investigated with whom he falls in love. Ashlyn has a traumatic romantic history of her own, so when the investigation draws an heir of one of the authors into her life, Hemi and Belle’s tale reaches across time to help mend a current-day broken heart.

I am not a historical fiction or romance reader, but Barbara Davis is one of those authors that I pick up her books based on name recognition alone. She’s a talented author who excels at spinning a compelling yarn.

The Echo of Old Books is no exception. The format is brilliant and works so well to advance not only Belle and Hemi’s stories but Ashlyn’s as well. Often sad, sometimes frustrating, the historical component of what happened and why is as heartbreaking as it is a good reminder of the dangers of political alliances in our nation’s distant past. As Barbara’s books tend to, the tale ends on a high note that makes it an overall feel-good read. Cleverly conceived and expertly written, The Echo of Old Books is recommended for anyone who enjoys reading romance and a homage to old books.
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Although this literary mystery is very well written, I had trouble being pulled into this story for the first bunch of chapters. Once I was, I finally became invested, and I enjoyed Ms. Davis’s depictions of the 1940s New York political climate and the social caste system. The main character, Ashlyn Greer, is gifted or cursed with psychometry, which allows her to feel the emotions of people who have read one of the used books she sells in the rare bookstore and bindery she inherited. The mystery she and a young man named Ethan Manning unravel unfolds in two professionally published books that list no author or publisher, one (Forever, and Other Stories) an answer to the other (Regretting Belle), that together tell two sides of a brief forbidden love affair. The story is told mainly through Ashlyn in the 1980s and then through Marian (the “Belle” in the title of the book) in 1941 and then going forward. If the beginning were somehow reworked to grab readers’ attention sooner, it might have been more successful, but it was nevertheless a clever story largely about letting go of the anger after a heartbreaking betrayal and finding a way forward without it at the center of your life. ( )

What if you find two books, the only copies of each, that tell the same tale from two perspectives, written by two separate people, both tales end in misunderstanding. And what if you have the rare ability to pick up vibrations, sensations, emotions of previous readers, plus a clue as to who one of the authors. Would you try to solve the mystery of what went wrong? ( )