Eona by Alison Goodman

5/10

I have recently had an uncanny good run of books to read and review. One of those books included Eon by Alison Goodman, and so it was natural that Eona would be on that same pile of books for me to read and enjoy.

Instead of anything cataclysmic happening in my life to make up for the supremely well written books I was reading, life just sent me a sour lemon of a book instead. Eona.

You have to wonder how someone can stuff up a sequel. If you’ve got a winning strategy in your first book, why go and undo it in the second?

That’s a question I was asking myself a lot while reading Eona, and one I still can’t answer for you. Eona left me unsatisfied and frustrated, something that a book should never do, in my humble opinion.

Before picking apart the bad stuff, I want to just say that Alison Goodman obviously as a career ahead of her. She has the ability to write really well, the depth of detail and ability to not overwhelm the reader with that same depth of detail is a fine art that I think Goodman has mastered, and her imagination is quite catching.

However in a few areas, she finds herself lacking, and that brings me to the bad stuff.

Characterisation is an important facet of any book, and if you don’t have a consistent character, you’re severely undermining your work. Even if your character is supposed to be an inconsistent character, be consistent in their inconsistencies.

Throughout this whole book, every character with a semblance of import jumped from personality to personality like a schizophrenic druggy: angry beyond belief (or, as it turns out, beyond explanation) one moment, friendly and sympathetic the next; held to be a lying and manipulating bitch one minute, trusted confidant the next, without any of the necessary explanation for either, she just was.

And that’s what I hated with this book. There was so much “she just was” about it. If I had been led to see that she was a manipulating bitch, then I might have been a little happier about the inconsistencies in the characters. But I was never allowed to see for myself. I was continually told from moment to moment how I should be viewing this character or that.

The story itself was a mixture of satisfying conclusion and unsatisfying attempt to build a Sanderson-esque world. Goodman strikes me as someone who has read Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series, and thought to herself, “I can do that.” Turns out, however, that she can’t actually, and that left the book to finish on this weird non-ending, like a spinning-top that never quite falls over and stops; you just walk away wondering what happened.

I loved Eon, and think it’s worth a read. But if you’re a completest and are going to need to read both books, I might actually recommend not bothering with either. It’s up to you, I’m afraid.