Eon by Alison Goodman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I vacillated between four and five stars for this book, and I ended up going with my *feels* instead of being hoity-toity and and judging it purely on its very few imperfections (of which I can’t call up an example at the moment, go figure).
Eon is written well, to start off. I was turning pages with an elevated heart rate, desperate to see what happened next. It was awesome. I was so sucked into the story and I felt Goodman gives the reader just the right amount of exposition about the geography and culture of Eon’s world. The history, not so much. This is crucial to the plot, however, as the reader begins to become aware, slowly, that a destructive patriarchy has erased and tried to rewrite the mystical laws and history of the world.
Speaking of, I really, really liked how Goodman confronted many feminist topics in a fantasy setting. Clearly, this is nothing new, especially YA fiction. I chose this book on Tamora Pierce’s recommendation (her quote is on the cover), and she has been writing pro-feminist YA fantasy for like, almost 30 years now? I think the major difference I would draw between a Pierce novel and Goodman’s Eon is that Tamora Pierce’s worlds sometimes have pockets of equalized cultures and traditions, in which women are protected. This is only hinted at in Eon, in which the eponymous character faces death with no quarter in hiding her sex. There is more hardness in Goodman’s reality, which seemed more realistic to me than Pierce’s style of tart practicality.
The other thing I really liked was the treatment of Lady Dela’s character. I won’t go into it to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that I thought she was very well done by the author.
Anyway, I’m really looking forward to reading Eona, and I’m glad to have discovered another author who does fantasy so very well.