When Someone Else Enters the World of Echo of Atlantis

For years, Echo of Atlantis: The Ūmdëdŭ Codex existed mostly in my head, then on my computer, in notebooks, research files, maps, timelines, character sketches, and eventually between the covers of a book. I knew where the story came from. I knew the history behind it. I knew what I wanted the characters to become, and what questions I wanted them to ask.

Then the book got published, and the world stopped belonging entirely to me.

Readers bring their own history to a story. They notice things I didn’t plan for. They connect threads I didn’t know I’d left visible. Sometimes they see exactly what I hoped they’d see. Sometimes they see something I hadn’t quite realized myself.

That’s what made Jadidsa Perez’s review of Echo of Atlantis: The Ūmdëdŭ Codex for Independent Book Review such a rewarding read.

Perez describes the novel as a story of “ancient prophecies, awakening powers, and an academy for the gifted”—but what struck me was how clearly she saw that the book isn’t ultimately about extraordinary abilities.

It’s about choice.

The Question Behind the Power

At the center of Echo of Atlantis is a simple question: what would you do if you had extraordinary power?

The harder question is what comes after. Would you use it to help people, or to remake the world in your own image? Does the ability to do something ever grant you the right to do it? What happens when someone is utterly convinced their vision for humanity is the correct one?

Those questions live in the conflict between Maximilian Obsidian and the people who oppose him. They’re built into the history of the Atlantean descendants themselves.

Atlanteans were given extraordinary gifts. What they did with those gifts produced two very different answers: some chose to protect; others chose to dominate.

That war didn’t end with the last generation. It got inherited by this one.

Perez named that inheritance precisely: a struggle between restraint and ambition. Power isn’t the danger in this story. Neither is ambition. The danger starts the moment someone stops asking what their power is for.

Isabella Was Never Meant to Be Easy

Of everything in the review, what Perez wrote about Isabella meant the most to me.

She calls Isabella ambitious, opinionated, tough, someone with “no qualms advocating for her viewpoint.” And she noticed that the book doesn’t treat Isabella like a power-hungry archetype who needs correcting.

I wrote her that way on purpose.

Isabella wants things: recognition, influence, control over her own future. And she isn’t interested in apologizing for any of it. Early on, she’d rather chase a shot at becoming an influencer than sit through the Awakening ceremony, a choice that looks very different once you understand what she is becoming.

But that’s the point.

Isabella begins the story as a teenager living in a world she doesn’t understand yet, with her own idea of success and no clue she’s part of something larger. When that larger world reveals itself, she has to decide who she wants to be inside it.

Perez picked up on something I cared about a great deal: the people around Isabella see her brilliance and worry about her isolation, not her ambition.

She isn’t punished for wanting power. She’s comforted for feeling like an outsider, and that’s the difference between a story about ambition and a story about why someone becomes ambitious in the first place.

Every Gift Has a Cost

Perez also noticed that this book won’t hand out superpowers without a bill attached. That was one of the foundations I built the whole story on.

It would have been easy to give these characters flashy abilities and let them be exciting for their own sake: move objects, see the future, read minds. But taken seriously, every one of those things creates a problem.

If you can read someone’s thoughts, where does privacy end?

If you can see a possible future, what do you owe the people standing in it?

If you have the power to change someone’s life, does that give you the right to?

Those questions shape the characters as much as their abilities do. The Awakening isn’t just about learning what they can do—it’s about learning what those abilities demand of them.

Some of them, Perez pointed out, may already be in moral debt. That idea, debt that accrues before you even know you’re spending, runs underneath the entire series.

The four of them didn’t start this war.

They may have to decide how it ends.

The History Beneath the Fantasy

Perez also picked up on the historical thread running through the book, and that meant something to me. My fascination with archaeology, ancient civilizations, and the gaps in what we actually know about the past isn’t set dressing here. It’s structural.

The ancient world in Echo of Atlantis isn’t a backdrop. It’s evidence. A trail, a set of fragments that might mean something different once you look at them from another angle.

That’s why the story moves between the present and the deep history underneath it: the characters aren’t just discovering that their world has secrets. They’re discovering that history itself might.

That’s what makes the Ūmdëdŭ Codex more than another mysterious relic. It suggests the past has been misread, and that recovering what was lost could change how we understand the present.

Archaeology, mythology, history, and speculative fiction meet at that point, and it’s where this series feels most like home.

A First Novel Becomes Someone Else’s Story

The best part of getting a review isn’t any single compliment. It’s realizing someone else spent real time inside the world you built.

Perez didn’t just summarize the plot. She named the themes I cared about while writing it: ambition, isolation, responsibility, morality, the cost of power, the weight of inheriting a history you didn’t create.

An author spends years deciding what a story means.

Then a reader tells you what they found.

Sometimes it’s exactly what you intended. Sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes they point out a connection that makes you look at your own book differently.

That’s the moment a story starts to feel alive.

The Beginning of the Journey

Echo of Atlantis: The Ūmdëdŭ Codex is my first novel.

There’s a particular kind of exposure in putting a first novel into the world. You spend years making decisions in private, then hand the whole thing over to readers who will make their own.

They’ll love some characters and dislike others. They’ll interpret events differently than you did. They’ll notice details you thought were buried and miss ones you assumed were obvious.

That’s exactly how it should be.

A novel isn’t finished when the author types “The End.” It’s finished when someone else opens it and starts reading.

I’m grateful that Echo of Atlantis: The Ūmdëdŭ Codex has had that chance, and especially grateful to Jadidsa Perez and Independent Book Review for entering this world and engaging with what’s underneath it.

The review closes by recommending the book to YA readers who enjoy exploring magic through an ethical and moral lens, with historical references, strong characters, and an academy full of secrets. I couldn’t ask for a better read on what I hoped this first book would become.

Because the story was never just about discovering extraordinary abilities.

It’s about discovering who you are when you have them, and what you choose to do with the power you’ve been given.

The Ūmdëdŭ Codex is only the beginning.