Eon: Dragoneye Reborn

WARNING: SPOILERS

I love Tamora Pierce. In my opinion, she’s one of the best female authors and has created some of the best female characters in literature. They’re cunning, strong and well-developed. My favorite is Daine from The Immortals Quartet, but Pierce’s first female protagonist, Alanna, from the Song of the Lioness quartet is definitely one of the finest out there.

Unfortunately, I’m not reviewing Song of the Lioness today. I am, however, reviewing a book that was highly praised by Pierce and sounded like a Far Eastern version of Alanna’s story. This is the story of a girl who’s disguising herself as a boy (like Alanna) in order to become a nobleman because girls aren’t allowed (like Alanna), and she happens to have extraordinary magical powers (like Alanna). Along the way, she befriends the prince, uncovers a palace conspiracy, and must prove herself just as good as any man in a male-dominated society (like Alanna).

To expand: the story is about a crippled sixteen year old girl named Eona who lives under the male guise of twelve year old Eon (insert eyeroll here). She suddenly rockets in social standing when she’s chosen to be a Dragoneye, a high-ranking person who can communicate with a dragon and use its power. What’s more is that the dragon that chooses her has been missing for 500 years. (There are twelve dragons total, each representing an Eastern zodiac animal, a direction on the compass, and a moral value.)

However, the sudden return of the Dragon Dragon (or Mirror Dragon) disrupts the plans of the Rat Dragoneye, Lord Ido (the bad guy until the very end), and the general of the imperial military, the Emperor’s half-brother, High Lord Sethon (not the bad guy until the very end). Eon finds herself wrapped up in a multifaceted war for control over the country, and must find the courage to face her true self in order to fully unite with her dragon.

MAJOR PROBLEMS

If you’re going to write a 500 page story, make sure you have a 500 page plot

Eon is 531 pages long. However, if I was editor, I would have cut at least 200 pages before sending it to print. The story drags from beginning to end, with only a few respites here and there. It takes the first 100 pages to even get to the first major plot point (choosing the new Rat Dragoneye apprentice and the reappearance of the Mirror Dragon). One fifth of this book is dedicated to exposition, most of it happening in very static scenes: Eon walks home from training for about twenty pages. She exposits about the world around her and its many incredible sights, like the foreigner who sells cinnamon buns. She and her master sit around for a few more pages and go over more exposition. Then she sits around by herself for a few more pages until the morning of the apprentice ceremony arrives.

Why, yes, Ms. Goodman, I do understand that you’re setting up this complicated and well thought out world for me. I am actually quite impressed that you’ve put so much detail into your world and it would help it seem all the more real if you had balanced these details with plot.

As it stand, however, you could have had Eon get her dragon, stress about not having her dragon’s power, struggle with the intra-palace factions, and even have made the true politics sections interesting all in 300 pages.

Repeating yourself makes you sound redundant

Before we get to the first chapter of the story, there’s a prologue and several pages of visuals that explain the history of the dragons and the basic ins and outs of the Dragoneyes. Around page ten, Eona, our narrator, explains the history of the dragons and the ins and outs of the Dragoneyes.

Most of the time, writers don’t need prologues. A lot of them are either infodumps that drag down the narrative or unrelated scenes meant to hook in the reader with the start of a different, often more exciting story. Flavor text. That doesn’t mean all prologues are bad. What would Star Wars be without its iconic wall o’ texts before each movie? However, as I mentioned, Eon went through a lot of trouble to make sure the reader got all of the information she needed to understand the basics of Dragoneyes before the first chapter. Repeating it all was a wasted effort and only further stalled the reader.

Do you really have to ask so many questions?

Rhetorical questions can be a good way of getting to know a character. They can hint at the character’s goals and dreams or to the fact that their tragic flaw is inaction. Either way, the question is eventually answered through the character’s actions and the readers are more enriched.

Do you expect the same from this book? Am I the most caring and sensitive book reviewer?

Eon doesn’t just have rhetorical questions, it has Captain Obvious rhetorical questions. I’m talking about questions that the narrator throws at us that either have just been answered or are so obvious we begin to think her common sense was also run over by the cart that crippled her (or that she was so stupid in the first place, it ran away).

Eon asks if the fighting master might throw the match (he hates her). She asks if her Sun (male) energy had totally suppressed her Moon (female) energy (she’s drinking a tea that suppresses her Moon energy). She asks if the crowds see a girl or a eunuch (her master told everyone she was eunuch and they have no reason to not believe him).

Now, I understand that since the book is in the first-person POV, there will be some introspection, but this many rhetorical questions is the laziest attempt at characterization I’ve seen in a while. Again, they only pad out the book to its 500+ pages and they don’t do anything to further the narrative. Any reader trying to find deeper meaning in most of these questions is wasting his time.

If you advertise dragons as part of your story, by god, you’d better have dragons

The dragons show up at the beginning and at the end. That’s it. Well, okay, if you want to nitpick, they appear briefly throughout the book but only as spiritual projections. They don’t do anything except at the beginning and at the end.

And that’s just boring.

Dragons are some of the most interesting mythical creatures out there, and while you don’t have to make every story that features one revolve around their mythos, Eon should have tried harder. Actually, I’m making a rule right now that if “It” appears in the blurb and sounds like a big deal, “It” better be a big deal. Don’t tell me a girl is hiding out as a guy so she can control dragons when it’s actually a political story. You promised me dragons! I want dragons! Same goes for every other “It” out there.

All you blurb writers, listen up! Make sure you get a proper summary before you write the blurb. I know the goal is to make the book sound accessible to as many demographics as possible, but it’s best if you write for the audience that reads the genre the book is in (side note: Young Adult is not a genre).

All you authors, listen up, too! Make sure you give blurb writers a proper summary of your book! Don’t just tell them your idea, tell them your plot. Don’t just tell them your hook, tell them your plot. Don’t just tell them your conflict, tell them your plot.

The saddest part:

Alison Goodman is a great writer. Don’t get me wrong, I think Eon is a frustrating book that should be attempted by only the most patient of souls, but there are two scenes in it that stand out.

The first came early on, at about the 100 page mark. Goodman was writing Eon’s apprentice ceremony fight scene. And to my eternal delight, it was thrilling:

“It was a blink—a reflex as his outstretched blade swung above his head to twin the other in a wide arc.

The Goat Dragon.”

And that’s just the beginning of a tense, exciting fight scene that made me forgive the first 100 pages of the book. I was seriously ready to ignore the slow, annoying start—after all, it is a pretty complicated and detailed world that the author gave a lot of thought to, and it was just the beginning. Now that the exposition was out of the way….

Except, the wonderful writing lasted only for that scene before petering out and returning to more of the same.

The second beautiful scene made me wait until the end, so I was less receptive to it at first. (By the way, these were both the scenes with the dragons in them. Coincidence?) Eon is put in charge of using her dragon powers to move a typhoon. However, she can’t move it because she can’t access her powers. On top of that, she’s been taking steroids   to try and strengthen her connection (not kidding), but it’s only been weakening it. She calls to Lord Ido’s dragon, but he catches her and takes over her body. This ensues:

“I raged in silence as he used my body and voice to direct the Dragoneyes. I felt his fierce joy as his power joined with mine, draining me. I watched, helpless and in awe, as the huge circle of beasts slowly contained the energy of the storm and moved it over the dam.”

That is the sort of writing you show off to people. That is the sort of writing you include in excerpts to hook people in. The downside? It’s at the end of the book. It’s one of the final plot twists, so she can’t show it to potential book buyers without saying, “I have to give you the context for this passage, but I can’t because then I’ll be spoiling everything, but then you won’t understand anything.” Since you all obviously don’t care about that sort of thing, you can understand my argument better.

Anyway, that second scene is wonderful. Even when I reread it to transcribe it, I got goosebumps and felt the need to take a long shower. So, if you ever stumble upon this column, Ms. Goodman, could you please write like this all the time? I know it’s kind of a disturbing request, “Please write rape-y toned scenes forever” but you’re wonderful at it!

In conclusion:

If you liked Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet, you might just like Eon: Dragoneye Reborn and its sequel, Eona: The Last Dragoneye. I still favor Pierce because I think she managed to create strong characters and interesting worlds while still keeping her stories fresh and exciting. And as long as they needed to be, no longer. Goodman, not so much.

It’s apparent that she was more excited about the mythology behind her world than the people populating it, and that wouldn’t be terrible if the book was shorter or if the plot was different. The pacing is really the biggest factor here, since this book is a huge time commitment for a reader, and, in my opinion, might make people regret their purchase of a brick when the first fifth consists of nothing but an infodump.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Hello! I’m Wolfwum, and welcome to Annotations, a column for book reviews. I’m writing this as a companion to The Bookshelf Revue, a book review show. There’s a lot to say about books that I don’t think a video series will be able to cover on its own; after all, it takes two hours to get through a whole movie or a few episodes of a TV series, but two hours spent on a book (especially irritating ones) can net you maybe two plot points and two dozen sticky notes.

So, in order to remedy the imbalance of story and technical coverage, I decided to dedicate part of my time to writing this. I figure the show will focus more on the overall story, characterization, and presentation, whereas this column will focus on the techniques that make or break it.

So, without further ado:

Warning: Spoilers

Leviathan, while operating on a solid premise and hook, baffles me to no end. How do you screw up genetically engineered animals and steampunk robots in World War I? Well, naturally, it’s a combination of ideas interacting with each other in unfortunate ways, but the problems plaguing Leviathan are more subtle than other disasters like, say, My Immortal. But let me clarify something: this book is not “bad.” Oh, it comes really close to the definition, but it manages to skip clear of it at the last second, like that slacker kid in your class who never has anything to say unless it’s about himself, doesn’t do his homework, but is still promoted because he got a D.

It’s still not a “good” book--far from it. However, instead of laying on its side to expose everything it thinks it’s doing right, Leviathan actually tries to be entertaining. In the end, it’s just a messy pile of “mediocre.”

The book follows the historical-fictional misadventures of Alek, son of the Archduke of Austria, and Deryn, a female masquerading as a male in the British Air Service. The whole story takes place at the beginning of World War I, in a world where “Darwinists” splice animals together and “Clankers” have steam-powered robot tanks.

Alek has to flee his home in the middle of the night in a steam-powered mech because the Germans want to find him and kill him just like his father. Deryn, meanwhile succeeds in getting onto the Leviathan, an organic, gene-spliced airship. After about 200 pages of traveling and four German attacks in a row, the two protagonists finally meet up in Switzerland. Suddenly, they’re forced to put aside their cultural differences and work together to escape before the Germans kill them all.

There’s also a subplot about transporting mysterious eggs to the Ottoman Empire that is  supposed to be the setup for the sequel, and features amazing illustrations by Keith Thompson.

Major Problems:

This fantastical world is not fully realized.

The writing is so bland that I can’t visualize what the author wants me to. Since most of his target audience will likely never have been to England, Austria, Germany, or Switzerland, they’re not going to know what those places are like in this world. Add in the robots and wonky genetics, and it gets even more confusing. I read and write fantasy and sci-fi, so I know how important it is for writers to really embed readers into their new worlds immediately. Granted, infodumps are annoying, but getting the basics out of the way through tone, speech and imagery--like in Song Quest or A Clockwork Orange--isn’t that hard. Here, it’s like Westerfeld had an 8x10 image in his head of what his world was and what he wanted it to be, but he never shows the reader more than a 3x5 portion of it.

You can't tell what's going on.

It’s pretty, but the art doesn’t make up for the lack of good storytelling.

The cover is gorgeous! The illustrations are wonderful! The map is amazing! However, the story is illustrated. Period. Yeah, thanks to the pictures, I got the idea of what a hydrogen sniffer (a dog spider...) was, but that understanding should come first from a visual explanation through the text. Illustrations in prose novels not in the children’s section should be treated as accessories: things that enhance the reading experience, but don’t distract from it. The only picture that wasn’t there to replace imagery was the illustration of Alek’s father’s watch at the end of the chapter in which he shares the story of his parents’ courtship. I was surprised when I came across it because it didn’t feel forced or redundant. It just punctuated the chapter’s theme.

Granted, if this had been a graphic novel, I probably would have absolutely nothing to complain about.

Half of it is exposition.

And the other half is early rising action. This overlaps with the pacing issues and the bad characterization, but think about what the plot of this book is supposed to be. It’s about Alek and Deryn coping with the outbreak of war, meeting up, overcoming cultural differences, and escaping with the MacGuffin eggs. Coping is the over-arcing idea and Westerfeld had the entire book to develop it, so why take half the book to get to the meet-up? It’s a waste of time on a reader’s part to know what’s going to happen only for the inevitable to happen long after it was expected. Especially when the 200 pages you’re dedicating to extra exposition have more explosions than characterization or rules of the world combined.

It doesn’t end

It just kind of stops. Like most books in a series, it ends on a cliffhanger, but it’s a bad cliffhanger. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 or Back to the Future 2 bad. It doesn’t make me want to read on, it makes me have to read on in order to get the entire story. That wouldn’t be so bad if I’d come to enjoy the characters, tone, style, and organization, but Leviathan doesn’t get me invested in any of it.

Like I said before, the entire book is really just exposition and rising action, so there’s not even a clear climax for anything to resolve itself after. No loose ends get cleared up--there weren’t any. Nothing big is set up for the next book except for the eggs, but they aren’t even our central issue. We don’t even have any tension leading us into the next book; by the time our “heroes” are sailing off to the Ottoman Empire, the Great War is a footnote on everyone’s agenda!

With all that nothingness in mind, is it that surprising that the ending was more than a letdown?

The pacing is awful.

Having multiple points of view is just fine in a novel, but hopping back and forth between Alek and Deryn every two chapters is too frequent (and such a weird number, too). Most of the time, the reader is just getting re-settled into the current POV character when a new chapter suddenly starts. It’s even bad between same-character chapter breaks; the first Alek chapter ends with him, Volger and Klopp sneaking out of the estate, but the second opens right up to them arriving at the Stormwalker! Nothing about either scene suggested that such a huge pause was necessary. They just changed related scenes, something generally indicated by a page break.

One of the protagonists should be demoted.

Neither Deryn nor Alek get the appropriate amount of time they need for proper characterization. I’m going to pin a lot of the blame on the fact that there’s two of them, and both needed a lot of characterization because of the genre. And it didn’t work out.

Deryn is the more developed character only because the author really took his time to relay Deryn’s way of thinking to the point that it’s obvious which he prefers. Even though she’s a Mary-Sue, Westerfeld did a good job making sure that she’s only at the “Annoyingly proficient” end of the Sue-scale (the scale going from “Annoyingly proficient” to “God’s gift to everything with really awesome powers that can be learned ridiculously quickly, can excrete gold, make flowers grow just by looking at dirt, and all the animals freakin’ adore this person and you should, too, otherwise you’re just a horrible, horrible, less than human THING!”). However, if he’d given himself the entire book to work with her, she would have had all the right lead-up to her amazingness. Without Alek messing things up by not doing anything important, she could have been a respectable protagonist.

On the other hand, if Westerfeld had created the Leviathan series as a series of graphic novels, 1) think of how awesome it would look based on the artwork and 2) Deryn would have been able to get away with more Sueish qualities because we would’ve been shown what she had to go through.

An example of de-Sueifying across mediums

Ellipses... do not work that way.

I gave up on counting the number of misused ellipses, but I remember the last one I numbered was in the thirties. Thirties. I know it’s a small thing to harp on, but after the first five, I got the impression that Westerfeld was trying to create suspense... where there wasn’t any.

Steampunk really does not work that way.

The “Punk Punk” subgenres are popular, but fairly new territories. However, some precedents have been in place for decades that separate them from regular science fiction. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of--if not the--most influential books in cyberpunk solidified some basics that a -punk novel must contain. Typically, they’re set in a vaguely altered, somewhat darker version of our Earth. Cyberpunk is set twenty minutes into the future, and steampunk typically takes place around the turn of the century.

The second and most important part of -punk, however, is how the main character deals with his warped society. Repo! The Genetic Opera (biopunk) did this by telling the story of how a young girl found freedom in a perpetually indebted society. Neuromancer did it by showing how people may not be able to handle sadistic technology that’s smarter than they are. Although I think the literary world could benefit from having soft -punk novels, Leviathan doesn’t come close to exploring the ramifications of the different technologies. The closest it gets is the short “debate” between Alek and Deryn about their respective countries’ science preferences.

How do you housetrain these guys?

I’m convinced that Westerfeld, like so many these days, got caught up in the visual aesthetic of steampunk. This book looks like what you’d imagine a steampunk novel should be, he just forgot to add in the major principles behind the genre. As I already complained, visuals mean almost nothing to prose; an attractive cover and relevant typefaces are about the extent of how fancy books can graphically get.

It’s a real shame that Leviathan wasn’t given the proper TLC I think it deserved in editing. It could have been a great start to an impressive series, but I think they were banking more on Westerfeld’s name selling the book than the quality of the content. While I have not read the Uglies series yet, I’ve heard mixed reviews about it (that is was wonderful until Extras) and the premise interests me (I’m a sucker for dystopias). So, I’m not going to write Westerfeld off as a hack, but I am going to say that Leviathan was a huge disappointment to me.