Eon is a surprisingly readable book that develops some major issues by the end.

It also has a lot of different covers that vary in how much dragon they have.

It’s set in vague oriental emperor times, with a world that doesn’t exactly cry out with verisimilitude but is still better than plenty of the knights and kings feudal times settings standard fantasy uses because at least it’s a bit different. It’s somewhat flat, but it makes it easy to follow.

The first portion of the book is really the best. Eon is a crippled teen pretending to be a eunuch but actually a girl. Dragoneye candidates are supposed to be healthy and the test requires mastering a series of sword forms, one of which Eon isn’t even capable of doing due to her damaged leg. Her injury is a constant hindrance to her and also a constant drain as she has to try to pretend it isn’t a problem as much as possible, leaving her constantly running up against the edges of her endurance. On top of this, even her household is trouble – she’s a slave owned by one of the former dragoneyes, whose fortunes are in bad decline. He’s used up what money he has left training her as a candidate, so if she fails, it’s over for him.

There’s also court politics to contend with. This year is the rat dragon’s year, and the rat dragoneye already has an unusual amount of power because the elder died early while he was an apprentice, leaving only him connected to it. His dragon will be ascendant this year and have twice the power. Also, he and her owner are opposed.

To counterbalance all this, Eon does have one advantage – she is extremely talented spiritually, able to see the magical energy and even glimpse the dragons. That talent is why she’s there at all, despite being crippled and the wrong gender.

Oh, also, there’s a missing dragon in the circle. The mirror dragon, which is to say, the dragon of the year of the dragon, has been “missing” for five hundred years, ever since the hall burned down. It’s not quite clear how this works – do they still do the whole training thing for it and just nothing happens, or have they given up? Anyway, I noted this with trepidation, because mirror dragon sure sounds like an incredibly special thing, doesn’t it? But Eon’s actually already showing what seems like a connection with the rat dragon.

Things start to go sueish when it’s time for the actual test. The rat dragoneye pulls a last-minute change and says that instead of the candidates demonstrating the sword forms, they’ll do actual sword fights and also the guy doing the sword fights will be his own guy. And no one can do anything to oppose this. It seems like the guy already has taken over the court, which leaves me feeling unsure about the plot of keeping him from getting too much power – it seems it’s a bit late for that. It’s just unnecessarily blatant that he’s trying to cheat, and then that just gets even more obvious during the actual test, where the guy in charge of the duels plays nice with his candidate and does his best to beat everyone else into paste.

Eon gets special ceremonial swords that tell her what to do, which I thought was a fitting advantage given her talent is supposed to be spiritual, but she loses at the last moment when the swords tell her to do the move she can’t due to her damaged hip. This doesn’t disqualify her, because no one’s actually sure how the dragons pick, and it’s never explained where they got the idea to do sword drills in the first place.

And when they’re all trotted out again for the dragon to pick, the rat dragon seems to be ready to pick her and then the mirror dragon appears! And all the other dragons bow to it, even the ascendant rat dragon.

This bit is more an issue of taste – there’s good reason to be pulling out the mirror dragon, and it serves to get attention on her in a very dangerous situation, plus it’s cool. But I’d have preferred the rat dragon, because she’s already super good with dragons without her getting the extra special one, and directly fighting over it with the current dragoneye would have been good. It seems like that’s what her special dragon connection is best suited for – she could see it even before being connected, so she has the best chance to wrest it from the evil guy.

Everything goes downhill from there.

Eon is now a lord in her own right, not a slave, and yet despite being trained up for this for years, needs a handler to explain basic court etiquette to her. The next chunk of the book is explanation after explanation because she’s so out of her depth. Also, her handler is a transgender woman, and it’s about here I realize the author really wants to make a point about gender. To the book’s credit, it’s handled mostly well – the problems I have mostly stem from Eon herself. Much like her ignorance of etiquette, I found her issues with gender presentation awkwardly presented. She’s constantly thinking about how she’s not really a boy and very easily flustered for someone who’s been living as one for years, and since before puberty. And the ultimate resolution on gender at the end of the book is…well, bad.

The next chunk of plot is a lot of Eon being stupid. She’s having trouble communing with her dragon and can’t figure out why, despite the fact the mirror dragon is supposed to represent truth and she’s lying about who she is – and this turns out to not even be the actual issue, exactly. But it doesn’t even occur to her that this might be a problem, even though when they connected, she felt like it was trying to make her shout her real name of Eona. There’s also a book that’s one of the last relics of the mirror dragon which was really transparently stolen, but the prince is completely oblivious to this and even she only guesses because she hates the guy involved and assumes he’s out to hurt her. And when she finally gets the book and finds it written in script she can’t read, she spends ages whining about how she’s screwed while I waited for her to remember she was told that women have a separate script. It’s only near the end that she works that out, even when she’s getting various clues (like taking testosterone supplement to try to commune with the dragon better just makes the magic book sulk and the dragon totally ignore her, so she takes MORE to try to fix that.)

Also, the evil rat dragoneye is abusing/poisoning the new rat dragoneye who was chosen (and it’s even Eon’s friend) but nothing is done about this. Considering how important it is to have people connected to the dragons and that you only get one chance per decade to add a new one, you’d think they’d have some sort of protections in place for the apprentices, but apparently they’re treated like they’re as disposable as slaves.

The final resolution is that the mirror dragon is a girl and her dragoneyes have to be girls too, and in fact Eon’s ancestor was the last one! I found this very, very disappointing. The book opens with a bit about how the dragons work and adds that everyone just knows women would be useless for it, and the stuff about the dragon draining away energy make it seem like maybe women would be better suited for it, particularly given that with yang, there’s a lot about how men’s vital force is being drained away, but women don’t seem to have any such problem with yin. And there’s a lot of clues that the energy stuff works differently for her than the male candidates. And Eon’s candidacy seems to be one of chance – it’s only because she’s crippled that the deception is even possible, because cripples are unlucky so no one looks too close, as well as happening to belong to a guy willing to take this huge risk and having such dramatic spiritual talent to make anyone even consider it in the first place. I thought the lesson would be that female candidates were good and they’d never realized it because she was the first one who managed to get fielded. Instead we’re told she’s destined for it, and eventually even discover she was deliberately crippled for exactly this reason, and also possibly the mirror dragon candidacy travels by blood even when the others don’t, which Eon thinks is great because why succeed by merit when you can do it by genealogy?

I think the dragon thing is meant to be a positive message about gender, but things are divvied up uncomfortably – the mirror dragon is the most special, but at the same time, it’s the only female one, and by implication, all the rest are solidly male and as apt to refuse a female as the mirror dragon would a male. She does manage to connect to the rat dragon again, and it’s disastrous. The rat dragon is basically evil sadomasochistic ambition, because rats suck I guess, and also super male, because, and messing with it lets the evil guy possess her, and figure out her secret, and very nearly rape her. Twice.

It does do some interesting things. The prince she’s introduced to and asked to help turns out to be a nasty asshole, but she’s aligned with him as the lesser of two evils and some misplaced patriotism. And there’s a lot about transgender and eunuch characters (although I think the book goes overboard with this), and her close friend is disabled as well. And no love triangle! None whatsoever.

On the other hand, the ending is a disaster. She’s cornered by the rat dragoneye right as she manages to access her dragon, and the two dragons and two humans fight…and the human side of the fight is him tearing her clothes off and trying to get her legs apart so he can rape her. Luckily, she’s the victor…which somehow gives him emotions back? and makes him realize he did bad things, so she forgives him, spares his life, and begs him to flee with her to safety. The creepiest thing about this is it seems to be magically enforced or something, because she’s all upset and creeped out the whole time and wondering why she’s doing this.

Also, she wins because her magic ancestor spirit swords tell her to do that move she can’t do, and this time she obeys them and finds she can do it, and it turns out she’s instantly healed so she’s no longer disabled. so I guess she should have just done the move when she was told to do it at the start and been magically healed then, and also the moral here is that if you’re physically unable to do something and someone says you should do it anyway, you should do it anyway because they know better than you. It’s particularly disappointing when the book started out handling her disability so well.