Clare L. Deming

I have previously read Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey and really enjoyed it (but I didn’t post a review here). I had been meaning to get to another of her novels and finally found time to read The Echo Wife for a recent book club discussion (paid links).

Here is the blurb:

I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married.

It took me so long to hate him.

Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be.

And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband.

Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.

Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

I think that this book held a lot of promise with the subject matter, but in some ways, it failed to deliver on all of the ideas that it initiated. The blurb doesn’t explain the premise in this book well, but at its heart, it’s about the science of cloning and the ethics behind the use of those clones. If you create a human clone in a lab and use it for research, is it murder when you need to end your experiment and practically dispose of the materials? What if that clone has a personality and a life of its own? Is that situation any different?

In this book, the researcher’s husband creates a clone of her, but with modifications that fit his idea of a perfect spouse. Of course, the experiment goes horribly wrong, and that is the focus of this story. Oddly, it occurs in a vacuum, with little concern for the rest of the world that might notice something wrong in the cloning laboratory. This story could have easily turned into an action-packed thriller with police investigations and car chases, but that isn’t the focus here.

I don’t think I agreed with the characters’ decisions in the end, but I also don’t have a clone of myself hanging around, so it’s truly hard to know if I’d make a different decision or not. I enjoyed the book, even if I felt rather underwhelmed by the treatment of the topic.

Have you read any books by Sarah Gailey? Do you have any books on the ethics of cloning that you would recommend? Let me know in the comments (above).

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