Author: Alison Goodman
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!
Read acceptably by Nancy Wu
This was an oddball audio book - on its own discrete device. You can see from the images on my blog the recto (shown as the cover above) and the verso (below). I had problems with this device - of control and of volume, which was very low. This was on loan from the library - the borrower to supply battery and ear-buds - so perhaps I wasn't seeing it at its best!
Eon is twelve. Eona is sixteen. They're the same person! Her master is desperate, and the only way he can get someone into the dragon training with a hope of getting a position as one of the highly esteemed and powerful dragon-eye lords is to go with the flow, which in this case means maintaining Eona's deception that she's four years younger and of a different gender!
She and her rather cruel task master, whom she later idiotically mourns, hope for success but don't really believe it, especially not when the ascending rat dragon that year turns away from her. No one expects that the mirror dragon will put in an appearance given that it's not been seen in 500 years. And now it's adopting Eona despite her gender, despite her badly injured leg, and despite her inexperience.
This novel seems to have had more titles than Prince Charles. It originally started out as Two Pearls of Wisdom before becoming Eon: Rise of the Dragoneye or just plain Eon. This just goes to show that Big Publishing™ really knows how to screw up a good book. Or a bad one in this case. Having said that, even in their self-righteous ineptitude, they can sometimes blindly stumble onto a success.
I think Eon is actually a better title than Two Pearls of Wisdom ever could be, even though it’s way over-used in the sci-fi and fantasy worlds, and so it follows that Eona is the perfect sequel title, even as I have to observe that within an Asian context, simply removing an 'a' from a name to render it male really has no meaning. This business of mixing-up Asian and western culture sometimes works in this novel, but it often does not, and instead ends up rendering the story nonsensical.
I've seen some delusional reviews which pretend that the author is pushing some sort of transgender agenda(!). Clearly these reviewers are ignorant of how true to life this story is when it comes to certain cultures, such as the Hijra and Kathoey cultures in Asia. They seem to fail to grasp that gender is not a binary thing. It’s not one or zero, on or off, plus or minus, either / or. Gender is a sliding scale with female at the start and male at the end, and anyone can find themselves anywhere along that scale as a result of genetics, biochemistry, hormonal influences, and other processes.
It’s not just a matter of whether you have one X or two; it’s far more complex than that, especially in the animal world beyond that of our limited and largely ignorant human perspective. There are organisms in nature which can change gender based on environmental cues. It happens in plants, but also in animals. For example, amphibians such as the common reed frog, and fish such as believe it or not, clown-fish (Nemo finding?), as well as gobies, moray eels, Parrot-fish, and wrasses. The blue-banded goby, Lythrypnus dalli can change either way. Other animal groups also display these features, or are outright hermaphrodites - that is, intersexed, such as some gastropods and jellyfish.
If you're mistakenly coming at this from a designer or a creator PoV, then you need to understand this and realize that this creator of yours had no sexual preference whatsoever. "Ah," you say, "but the Bible says…" - nothing! The Bible was not written by any god. It was written by a host of primitive men who were scientifically ignorant, and who had been brainwashed under a strict patriarchal society all of their lives - a society where a woman could be bought for a few cows. They are as far as you can get from a reliable source, and you're truly foolish if you take their blind words as gospel.
This is not a children's book - it’s a young adult book and it's dishonest to try and portray it as some sort of pedophilic subterfuge, as some have done by hand-waving at characters such as the eunuchs and at mixed gender people such as Lady Dela. This is a wo-man who plays an important role. She befriends Eona, and in the same way that humans serve as conduits to transmit dragon energy into the human world, so Lady Dela, a 'contraire', serves as a conduit for Eon to understand that women are not as powerless as society tries to render them. The fact that it takes Eona forever to get this isn’t Dela's fault.
In passing, I do have to say that I didn’t get the 'contraire' thing. Yes, I know what it meant - Lady Dela was a man living life as a woman - 'his' natural calling as it happens - but why use the French word 'contraire' instead of the equivalent Japanese or Chinese word? This novel evidently prides itself upon melding Japanese and Chinese culture to establish its Asian ethos, so why a French word? That made no sense to me.
Moving on. I seem to have read a lot of stories lately where the Chinese zodiac came into play in one way or another! This is yet one more, because there are twelve dragons, plus an additional Mirror Dragon which adopts Eona - and for good reason. Indeed, the reason is so good that Eona simply cannot figure it out. She's not the smartest smartie in the box, unfortunately.
Nor is she at all proactive. She knows, at one point, that one of her friends is being poisoned, but she does nothing. She has the ear and good will of the emperor and the emperor's son, but instead of any of them taking charge and dealing with known threats, Eon and the son are cowering like they have no power and they're on the verge of extinction. I am not a fan of royal privilege or any privilege which comes through accident of birth alone, but in the context of this novel, the emperor's power is absolute, and for these idiots to act like they're powerless is pure bullshit and not remotely credible.
At one point, Eona plays down a known theft, under the stupid position that there's no evidence, when there is certainly enough to support an investigation at the very least. At a later point, she plays down the death of that dear friend who was poisoned, and there's almost no investigation into his murder, with everyone flapping their hands and almost saying "woe is me for there is no evidence". Yet she refuses to take a book of power that we know will be misused under the position that it will be investigated! It's either one or the other.
This novel is an example of what a writer does when they have an agenda (and not the one of which the fundies have accused it), but no good idea on how to get there. The whole point appears to be to show how Eona grows and becomes her own person, but there's no sensible or logical effort to get her there. She's very needy and whiny to begin with, which is hardly endearing, and it didn't improve in the part to which I listened. On top of this, she's unjust, which is exemplified embarrassingly when she inherits a home and servants.
'One of these servants was cruel and physically abusive to Eona, and it's clear that she has not changed, yet Eona fails to punish her and so very effectively lets her get away with this abusive behavior - indeed, by her inaction, condoning it. She gives freedom tokens to two slaves and makes a developmentally-challenged child her heir, which is ill-advised at best. I'm sure the author thinks this is a wonderful way to show how generous and just she is, but it doesn't work! At the same time as she's doing this, Eona keeps on all of her other slaves as slaves. That's hardly endearing. Not to me, anyway.
In the end, what defeated this novel for me was its ponderous length and tedious narrative. It's a first person PoV which isn't pleasant to listen to when the narrator (not Nancy Wu, the reader, but the character: Eona) is so self-centered, so clueless, and so whiny, but worse than that, the story just goes on and on with very little happening, and that very little is padded with acres of descriptive prose that's just not that interesting. I can't recommend this and I won't be reading the sequel.
