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. The story itself was a mixture of satisfying conclusion and unsatisfying attempt to build a Sanderson-esque world. I was continually told from moment to moment how I should be viewing this character or that. But I was never allowed to see for myself.

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. There was so much “she just was” about it.

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.Īnd that’s what I hated with this book. Even if your character is supposed to be an inconsistent character, be consistent in their inconsistencies. However in a few areas, she finds herself lacking, and that brings me to the bad stuff.Ĭharacterisation is an important facet of any book, and if you don’t have a consistent character, you’re severely undermining your work. 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. Eona left me unsatisfied and frustrated, something that a book should never do, in my humble opinion.īefore picking apart the bad stuff, I want to just say that Alison Goodman obviously as a career ahead of her. That’s a question I was asking myself a lot while reading Eona, and one I still can’t answer for you. If you’ve got a winning strategy in your first book, why go and undo it in the second? You have to wonder how someone can stuff up a sequel. 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. 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.

I have recently had an uncanny good run of books to read and review.

Eon eona