hollowistheworld's Reviews (105)

Echo of the Larkspur is a fun, light-hearted, sci-fi based workplace romance. Ciro, recently transferred to Ceres to do some work on their somewhat atypical security AI, is very determined not to like or trust this bizarre robot her needs to work with - but listen, the robot is really charming okay? He's very funny. And he talks a lot, so if he was going to go on a murder spree, he would probably accidentally tell you all about it first.
This is a very character-centric book. If you like your character development to be periodically broken up by characters being shot at, running for their lives, or the nuclear reactor threatening to explode, this may not be the book for you. If, on the other hand, you like most of your conflict to center around things like 'how much banjo is acceptable in music,' this may be just the thing you're looking for. There's plenty of heavy stuff around the edges - Ciro's pre-book trauma is pretty intense, Sage is unknowingly sitting on a box of things he doesn't want to talk about or he'll go hide under his bed for a month, and the climax of the book got my heart pounding, but Echo of the Larkspur is a pretty pleasant read. People butt heads, but most of the cast means well and look out for each other, as the best small communities will.

Things I didn't like:
There were a few things that would have made me like this book better, but not much. A few of those things are personal preferences/biases I won't hold against the author (I kept expecting things to take a nasty turn because the last several books I've read have been murder mysteries and this would be a perfect place to find a body). There was some stuff at the beginning with Sage having essentially impulsive thoughts that I would have liked to see come into the story more - they basically just stop and aren't really addressed. I think they might have been meant as a representation of Sage's worry that he is capable of becoming violent, but it wasn't really tied to that part of the plot in a way that made it feel like a good setup/payoff. 
I do wish we'd gotten to know Ilex better. He ended up being pretty central to the plot, and his role was pretty satisfactory, but I think an extra scene or two getting to know him (particularly getting to know him while he wasn't giving the world's scariest big-brother talk) would have really added to the end.
Only one thing in particular really stuck as something I didn't like and wish the author would have done a bit differently. This is from the very end of the book and I tried to keep it vague but major spoilers please click with caution!

Ciro (and I assume everyone else?) lies to Ilex about the details of what went down during the climax of the story, which Ilex has forgotten due to the damage he took. Considering what a big role personal identity/memory/autonomy play in the themes of this book, this felt like a weird, somewhat uncomfortable choice. It's so late in the story that it's easy to headcanon that this is just a temporary solution and they're going to tell Ilex the full story once his systems have stabilized, but if that was the intent I would have liked for Ciro or Sage to have made a quick reference to it, even just a one-liner about how much they aren't looking forward to that conversation.

Overall, this was a fun read! A bit different than what I usually read, as its primary genre, in my opinion, is Romance, and I'm not a very romantic person, but the characters were all fun to read about (always the most important thing to me), and the romance coming about through the lens of growing as a person and learning to let other people in - both for the robot and the human involved - made it a pleasure to read and to think about. If you like lighthearted, low stakes romances with lots of friendships scattered about, and you like it with some sci-fi elements thrown in, I would recommend Echo of the Larkspur. 

Didn't grab my attention at all, the characters were dull and grating, and the author seemed to think he was a lot cleverer than I thought he was.