After all, fairytales taught Echo that only outer beauty confers worthiness, and that all questions have answers. For Echo, Mokosh, and Hal, fiction holds the potential for addiction.Įcho North prods us to question our reliance on the stories that have been handed down to us over the generations. She also meets the princess Mokosh, who offers Echo cryptic advice and the possibility of friendship without judgement. She suspects that he is trapped in the mirrors, his ties to reality fraying. As Echo explores more of the mirrors, she meets fellow travelers, one of them a young man named Hal whom she finds both attractive and pitiful. The mirror library becomes Echo’s retreat from the increasingly chaotic house and from the wolf himself, who, as the year draws to a close, is careening toward a grim fate that Echo does not fully understand. Rather than books, it is filled with mirrors that are portals to fictional worlds. The greatest wonder of the wolf’s house is his library.

However, Meyer does not simply retell an old story she complicates and reconceives the genre’s conventions. The similarity to “Beauty and the Beast ,” the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche, and the Norse tale “East of the Sun West of the Moon” might make these plot points seem predictable. Although he sleeps at the foot of Echo’s bed, she must never light the oil lamp or look at him during the night. The house’s magic becomes dangerous at night, and the wolf warns Echo not to leave her bedroom until daybreak. He is confined in the house, and in his terrifying form, by a mysterious enchantment. Upon agreeing, Echo soon learns that the wolf is as much a prisoner as she is. The wolf promises to heal Echo’s father for a price: Echo must stay with the wolf for one year in his house under the mountain. As Echo rushes to his side, a wolf appears in the forest clearing-the same beast that scarred Echo’s face years earlier. There, Echo stumbles upon her father, not lost in the city after all, but terribly wounded. In his absence, Echo’s situation at home becomes unbearable and she flees to the woods. Hoping to pay off the debts that his new wife has incurred, Echo’s father journeys to the city. When her father remarries, the cruel new stepmother takes every opportunity to let Echo know just how ugly and worthless she is. Joanna Ruth Meyer’s second YA novel, Echo North, opens with a classic fairytale premise: Echo, who was attacked as a small child by a wolf, is scorned by her village because of the brutal scars on her face.

Echo north by joanna ruth meyer