Our Last Echoes, by Kate Alice Marshall

Age range: Young Adult

Genre: Horror

On the island of Bitter Rock, near the coast of Alaska, people disappear. It’s been happening for over a century – sailors, soldiers, commune members, researchers – have disappeared, never to be heard from again. Officially, these disappearances are accidents. Unofficially…

Sophia had never heard of Bitter Rock until a mysterious phone call alerted her that there may be more to her mother’s death than she knew. That perhaps her mother didn’t simply die in the hospital miles from the ocean when Sophia was a child, but that she was among the missing from a place called Bitter Rock.

Obsessed with finding out what really happened to her mother, and why her life seems to be plagued by strange events (did her reflection really sometimes move independently of what she was doing, or was it just imagination?), Sophia wrangles a summer internship at the Landon Avian Research Center (LARC) on Bitter Rock Island, where she meets the small research team stationed there for the summer, but also meets Liam, the son of the lead researcher, and Abby, who seems to be chasing the mystery of the Bitter Rock disappearances for her own ends. And Sophia learns the one ironclad rule of the LARC: no one goes outside when the mists come down…

Fans of shows like Stranger Things or Lost will find a compelling mystery, told not only from the point of view of Sophia, but also interspersed with vignettes from research files on the odd disappearances tied to Bitter Rock, and so gradually revealing the story not just through Sophia’s view of current events on the island, but information bearing on the disappearance of Sophia’s mother from Bitter Rock in 1993. The jump from present to past and back can sometimes be a little jarring, but the book keeps a good pace and provides a lot of mystery with a dose of suspense and horror. And while the story is wrapped up sufficiently in the end for this tale, room is definitely left open for a potential sequel.