LOVE CONQUERS ALL FOR TROUBLED SOULS

   Emily Spicer
   San Antonio Express-News

   ECHO
   By Francesca Lia Block
   HarperCollins

   Francesca Lia Block writes like a gardener coaxing flowers to bloom. Her words evoke seductive jasmine and fruity earth scents on the page. She creates a world where magic and love are the ruling forces and where angels and vampires live among the glamour and ghoulishness of Los Angeles.
   The story follows a girl named Echo — a girl with the power to see into people’s pasts — and the people in her life. She was born to an angel-perfect mother more beautiful than any depiction of Venus and who was inspiration to her artist-husband who faithfully painted only his wife. “My father found religion when he found my mother,’’ says Echo. “She is his unprecedented blossom, his chocolate-cherry-swirl birthday cake, ultimately his angel.’’
   And Echo is not. Not only does she never figure in her father’s paintings, but he has a tendency to ignore her own art as well. Growing up, Echo struggles with feelings of insecurity and insignificance, which result in her anorexia. Her life’s journey becomes a poetic, heartbreaking search for how to heal her body and psyche.
   Along the way, she meets angels such as her mother, friends and boyfriends, who help and nurture her, even if she realizes it only in retrospect. But she also meets life-sucking vampires.
   Block lets the reader meet each character through Echo and also independently, with chapters devoted to their stories. Each character has a past complete with angels and demons, and what it takes to heal each character often seems to run contrary to the interests of others, just like real life.
   Echo’s fabled mother, Eva, loses her husband only to find him again in the body of a white horse she takes for twilight rides in the hills. Echo’s boyfriend, Smoke, gives up everything believing that only his sacrifice will save his daughter’s life. Echo’s friend, Valentine, is so much a part of Los Angeles that she briefly becomes a prostitute to keep her life in the city. The result is an intricate network of story branches and roots, leaves and petals all held together by the flawed, human, exceptional Echo.
   In the end, love does conquer all. In fact, Block’s message seems to be that love guides the world all the way, not just at the end. She also teaches that love and magic are around us all the time, we just have to be willing to look for them - and pay more attention to what is beneath the surface.