Editorial Book Review: An Echo of Ashes by Ron Allen Ames

An Echo of Ashes 
By Ron Allen Ames

 

Publication Date: 25th March 2025
Publisher: Historium Press
Page Length: 247
Genre: Historical Fiction / Biographical Fiction

An Echo of Ashes is a story lost to time, then found again in century-old letters that lay in a tattered box.

Based on actual events taken from the pages, this story tells of when the Great War and the Spanish Influenza forever altered the lives of millions, including a family of subsistence farmers who also worked the oil fields of Pennsylvania.

Ella and Almon make their home in the backcountry. Almon and his sons work in the oil fields, just as their forefathers before them. As war and influenza break out, the parents seek to shield their family from the impending perils. Earl, the eldest son, is a gifted trombone and piano player. He is captivated by Lucile Lake, a girl from a higher social status. All he has to win her heart are his music and his words as the military draft looms in the foreground. Jack, a friend as close as a brother, faces the horrors of war at the Western Front. Albert's free spirit creates chaos as he searches for direction. Arthur's patriotism leads him to the Mexican border. Young Russell must suppress his fear to save a life, while Little Clara remains protected from the distress.

World War One and the Spanish Influenza Pandemic are most often documented separately, yet they intersected in 1918. For those who endured sacrifice and loss during this time, looking forward seemed their only choice. The sharp echo of tragedy, carried through the ashes of what once was, likely dulled but never vanished from their minds. This is just one of countless family stories from such a perilous chapter in American history.

"An Echo of Ashes" is a thoughtful and quietly powerful work of historical biographical fiction, tracing a young man’s coming of age in a world increasingly shaped by industry, war, and social upheaval. Drawn from the author’s own family records and rooted in real events between 1914 and 1919, the novel carries the sense of a story recovered from memory, carefully assembled from the remnants of a vanished time. A quietly devastating and beautifully restrained novel, it allows history to unfold through the intimate details of labour, family responsibility, and the gradual narrowing of personal choice.

At the centre of the novel is Earl Ames—known within his family as Top—a protagonist drawn with restraint, subtlety, and emotional credibility. Earl is not fashioned as a hero in the traditional sense, but as a young man of conscience and patience, shaped by discipline and obligation rather than by ambition. His development is measured and organic, and it is through his inward responses to events, rather than his outward actions, that the reader comes to understand the cost of the era.

A defining element of Earl’s character is the self-reliant life he leads. He works independently on the Cambridge lease and, alongside this dangerous industrial labour, maintains a subsistence farm that provides for his family. This dual existence—oil worker and farmer—grounds the novel in the realities of rural endurance, where survival depends as much on steady hands in the field as on courage in hazardous work. Ames uses this setting not merely as background, but as a formative influence, showing how constant responsibility cultivates humility, endurance, and a strong sense of accountability.

That inner life is revealed most clearly through music. Earl’s musicianship provides a counterpoint to the severity of industrial and agricultural labour, allowing the novel to explore the tension between duty and aspiration, practicality and imagination. In these moments, Ames suggests that identity is not singular, but layered—shaped as much by what one feels as by what one must do.

The romantic thread is handled with similar restraint. Rather than offering idealised passion, the relationship unfolds through hesitation, misunderstanding, and self-doubt. Class, expectation, and fear of inadequacy are allowed to complicate affection, resulting in a portrayal that feels grounded and emotionally honest.

When the narrative turns toward war, it does so through the experiences of Jack Litzinger, a close family friend. These battlefront passages are brief and controlled, and they serve less to dominate the story than to remind the reader of the distant violence pressing steadily upon lives at home. In this way, the war becomes a presence rather than a spectacle.

Closer still to Earl’s world, the arrival of the Spanish Flu introduces a second, deadlier threat. Ames captures the atmosphere of the epidemic with quiet effectiveness: closed spaces, anxious waiting, separation, and the pervasive sense that danger may arrive unannounced. The epidemic is not sensationalised, but presented as another force of history that tests endurance and reshapes ordinary life.

The novel’s principal weakness lies in the placement of historical documentation and explanatory asides. While the research is clearly careful and sincere, the frequent bracketed notes and inserted clarifications occasionally interrupt scenes that would otherwise sustain their own momentum. Much of this material would have been better reserved for an author’s note at the conclusion of the book. Additionally, the handling of horses suggests a limited familiarity on the author’s part, and a more in-depth understanding of their behaviour and care would strengthen those passages in which they feature.

"An Echo of Ashes" is, above all, a character-led biographical historical novel. Its strength lies in the quiet authority of its protagonist, the authenticity of his working and farming life, and the measured way in which large events are allowed to shape a single human story. Despite structural interruptions, it remains a moving affirmation that even in loss and uncertainty, a life lived with kindness and purpose leaves its echo long after the final page.

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An Echo of Ashes 

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Ron Allen Ames

Ron Allen Ames is a history enthusiast who attributes his 46 years of life experience as a hands-on business co-owner, for giving him insight into human nature, a benefit when portraying the lives of others. The information he received, dating 1914 to 1919 is what prompted Ames to bring this history to light in An Echo of Ashes. Ames lives with his wife Cathy in Pennsylvania. They have two grown sons.

"I don't see myself as the author of this book, but more of a conduit relaying the information given to me about the past. The family letters, postcards, journals, newspaper articles, and photographs found in a tattered old box contain a record of a somewhat forgotten time when a great war and a pandemic simultaneously struck the world. History records major events, statistics, details of destruction, and world changes, but it often overlooks the home front and the emotional impact of such a perilous time. An Echo of Ashes is just one of many stories from this era."

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