Echo North by Joanna Ruth Meyer

genre: young adult fantasy

Echo's life is quiet and lonely.   She works at her father's bookshop, she reads and chats with her brother - until her father goes to do an errand...and never comes home.  When Echo goes to find him, the entire trajectory of her life changes when a familiar wolf asks her a question that really has only one answer - if he promises to save her father's life, will she join him in his forest home for one year?  Of course, this wolf is not just any wolf, and in this retelling of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, Echo's life with the wolf is going to take her deep into a magic that she'll need to understand in order to get back the life that she loves.

I feel sad because while the first 2/3 of this book really captured me, the last 1/3 dragged.  I loved the wolf's forest home, the magic there intrigued and surprised me, even if I didn't QUITE understand how it worked or why.  A lot of good world building there and the writing kept my attention.  But after the plot twist that I saw coming, (seeing it coming didn't bother me - I'm familiar with the fairy tale it's based upon) the story slumped.  Too little action, things went so slow, the villain character wanted things and was angry about things for reasons that weren't ever really explained.  Especially sad is that I never really felt all in with the love in this story because even by the end, the characters never felt fleshed out and real enough for me to super care about.  It's possible that other readers won't mind the slow pace and I don't think it's a poorly written book, just not a good fit for me.