Book Review: EO-N
EO-N. Dave Mason. Self-published: Hellbox Editions, October 1, 2020, Paperback, E-Book, 298 pages.
Reviewed by Marssie Mencotti.
In 2019, Alison Wiley, a biotech CEO, is processing her new reality: she’s the last bud on the last branch of her family tree. On the heels of her mother’s crushing death, she's pulled into a seventy-four-year-old mystery by a chance discovery on a Norwegian glacier.
In 1945, Jack Barton flies combat missions over occupied Europe. Günther Graf, a war-weary and disillusioned Luftwaffe pilot, is trapped in the unspeakable horrors of Nazi Germany. Their paths, so different yet so similar, are connected by a young victim of appalling cruelty.
A story of love and loss weaves together five seemingly separate lives to remind us that individual actions matter and that courage comes in many forms.
Born in England and raised in Canada, Dave Mason is an internationally recognized graphic designer, and has co-founded a number of additional ventures, including OpinionLab Inc., the leader in web and mobile voice of customer feedback systems (acquired by Verint / Nasdaq VRNT); Cusp Conference LLC, the annual Chicago-based conference about ‘the design of everything;’ and PowerPlayer Inc., a company dedicated to helping youth coaches teach young athletes through feedback. EO-N is his first novel.
For those who have a love of puzzle-solving and also believe that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can change the world—this book is for you. I simply hated having to put this book down to sleep or eat. There are absolutely no slow spots. Dave Mason grabs us by the collar and plops us down in another dilemma, another fact that needs to be checked, another person who also has questioned the wartime protagonists and why the clues are so jumbled in the glacial discovery.
The parallel construct works perfectly because the two worlds of the novel are so different in scientific advances but so alike in the desire to do good. To make sense of it all despite the frequent intrusions of evil through misuse of finance and power. Emotionally, the author understands Alison’s grief and her need to touch her ancestors for some meaning in order to move forward. He writes eloquently about Alison and her detachment from family through untimely deaths and illnesses. Her natural inclinations first as a scientific researcher and then as a CEO propel her to find out what this odd finding on the glacial ice in Norway means to her life.
From the past, we meet a Canadian pilot and a German pilot, both with loving families at their respective homes and both with a great need to put those families back together in some way. There’s a strong undercurrent here that our combined ancestral destinies once entwined cannot be severed. Dave Mason masterfully unfolds the puzzle of how they became entangled in the first place. He shortens the distances between their World War II world and our contemporary one. Seemingly disparate strangers slowly fall into one another and both worlds spiral toward a conclusion that seems both possible, probable, and unavoidable.
I’m struggling not to reveal the genius in the construction of this book. It is spare. Don’t look for flights of fancy or fantasy. Its history is careful and verifiable. We ride along in the bumpy wooden de Havilland Mosquito that actually served as a two-man (pilot and navigator) bomber used at low and medium altitude for tactical bombing and at high altitude for everything else. I was breathing fast when the protagonists were in the air because, at that point in the war, everyone was shooting at everyone else in the air, on land, and at sea. The war was nearly over and good and evil were converging on land and in the air. Saviors were sometimes enemies and vice-versa. The politics were even denser as the thousand-year Reich having taken the worst of turns toward mass murder and enslavement struggled to save what it could of any scientific advance borne by their unethical practices. I was blinded by this book for a time, asking myself how I might feel if I were around in the last few days of madness on either side of the conflict. It can’t end fast enough. Mason makes us tangibly feel the tension of an end to a conflict that seems too slow in coming. We’re on the ground in Norway at the twisted end of a gigantic lie that ultimately took the lives and loves of millions of people both military and civilian. The positional timing of EO-N right at the end of the war makes it even more edge-of-your-seat exciting.
We are, in the contemporary chapters, guided by intelligent characters struggling with depression, PTSD, and loss of faith in the future but driven by a need-to-know, and a need-to-find-out. They are longing, and literally suffering from a crisis of identity. Each fact is revealed to them and to us by experts in all sorts of anthropological research, historical detective work, and DNA—driven science which connects scientific and governmental communities in multiple countries. What an immense scope this book takes while holding you in the palm of its hand, and with driving compassion, moves toward the solution of this simple but tangled tale. We want answers for our modern characters, both Alison Wiley and Scott Wilcox.
I have to admit that I wanted to hear more about the youngest character in the book. As an avid reader and writer myself, I have to resist folding everything too neatly and hastily after the exhaustion of holding it together on a razor’s edge for so long. The relief of a quick satisfying ending is a great temptation but when a book takes you on such an exciting and fast-moving flight over fearful times, a slightly softer landing blending contemporary and wartime sensibility would have suited this reviewer a little better.
Overall, a great read that I highly recommend. Dave Mason won’t let you forget that people fight and die in a war without ever fully knowing the great good that is quietly done by some people in a time of war. This book may be historical fiction, but in its heart, it is true.