Much like the sturdy bones of the centuries-old house in Echo Her Lovely Bones, the women who inhabited its rooms are bound together through the letters they leave in the attic.
In these letters, which form the novel, the women reveal their dreams, their disappointments, their griefs, and their hopes. Each letter moves us through the female experience that is shaped as much by historical context as it is by each woman's own life.
The women of Echo Her Lovely Bones include: a daughter reluctantly leaving the comfort of her family in northern Virginia to settle in the harsh Kentucky frontier as a new bride; a newly emancipated slave learning what it means to be free; a young law student in the Roaring Twenties testing her family's (and cultural) expectations for women; a woman wrestling with a dark family secret and debilitating depression; a traditional wife and mother beginning to question those traditional values; her now-grown daughter living out the repercussions of her mother's abandonment; a woman being forced to strike out on her after divorcing her husband of two decades; and her daughter, twenty years later, struggling with family issues in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These women echo the resilience of generations of women and affirm the importance of women finding their own voice.
Echo Her Lovely Bones is a special rerelease in a new second edition of Robinson's first novel, originally titled My Secrets Cry Aloud). Echo Her Lovely Bones includes a beautiful new cover by Annelisa Hermosilla, Foreword by Silas House (author of Lark Ascending, September 2022), a new chapter titled "Misty Newsom Albright November 1, 2020," Reading Group Guide, and Author's Note.