Echo Mountain

Lauren Wolk's Echo Mountain is a quiet, gripping story for 11 year olds about a mountain girl, a father who won't wake up and a trail of tiny wooden carvings.

What happens

Ellie is twelve. When the stock market crash made almost everyone poor, her family lost everything. First her father's tailor's shop, then her mother's teaching job, then the house. So they moved up Echo Mountain and built a cabin from scratch.

Ellie loves it. The woods, the work, the wildness. Her mother and big sister Esther very much don't (and they seem to hold it against her that she's happy).

Then a falling tree leaves her father in a deep sleep. By the time the story opens he's been lying in his little room for months, and the doctor can't say if he'll ever wake.

The first chapter is a cracker. A newborn puppy isn't breathing and Ellie's mother tells her to bury him. Instead Ellie plunges him into a pail of cold water, and he gasps back to life. She calls him Quiet.

And that gives her an idea about her father.

Meanwhile someone keeps leaving her presents. Tiny carved animals and flowers, so fine they look almost alive, turn up in her jacket pocket and by the brook. One day there's a carving of Ellie herself. So who's watching her from the trees?

Ellie tells the story herself, and it's a very still, thoughtful read. She notices everything, from the weight of a pup in her hands to the loneliness of an old cabin's tumbled stones. If your reader likes a book they can sink into slowly, this is a lovely one.

It's quite a heavy read in places, though. Her father's accident happens before the book begins, but looking after him is described plainly, right down to the sores from lying still. The family's old dog has died, animals are hunted and fished for food, and the hunger of those years feels real. None of it is gory. It's more of a grown-up, aching kind of sad, so a reader who takes things very much to heart might want to talk it through.

What to read next

If they want another twelve-year-old girl facing hard times in the hills, try Wolf Hollow. Annabelle's calm life on her family's farm is turned upside down in 1943, when a cruel new girl arrives at her little country school.