Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold Book Review
Eyes of SIlver, Eyes of Gold By Ellen O’Connel
There are only a few times in an avid readers life where they come across a book that touches them and embeds themselves into their hearts and minds the way this book has done for me. I got through this book in a matter of days and that was including deliberate attempts not to read it in order to prolong it eventually ending. I found myself literally laughing out loud, crying, screaming “WHAT?!” and in a complete emotional wreck by the end. It was honestly a fluke that I even read this book. It has been on my Goodreads to read shelf for two years and I am glad I took the jump.
This story is about Cord, a half-native black sheep, who is severely misunderstood by his family and the town around him and Anne, an un-ladylike spinster who is the shame of her family. The beginning of the book escalated to such abject violence so quickly I couldn’t put it down. Anne was severely beaten by her father for running away (even though he had been starving her for months for her refusal to marry a repulsive man) and Cord is beaten just as badly. They are forced married by the town priest and then a group of men proceed to beat Cord basically to death and leave them both there. Cord survives, I am not sure how in all honestly, and Anne not only nurses him back to health but is extremely protective to the point of violence of him. They decide to remain married but Cord believes she will eventually leave him and tries his best not to grow attached,
The rest of the book highlights the extreme prejudice that Cord, and now Annie, must face from the town and both of their families. Cord’s family, especially his two much older, very white, brothers really upset me on behalf of Cord and Annie. The prejudice was just so ingrained into them that they could not believe the truth staring them in the face. Cord is known for having a temper and for beating men up nearly to death in order to protect his sister or his own honour. They think he beats up Anne and that she is just docile. Honestly, by the end I lost hope they would ever fully come to realise the wrongness of it all; but at the end they were well on their way to that point. Cord is literally a man of very few words and hardly no outward emotion. However, in private we see him open up and his affection shown more openly. We know he would never harm a hair on Anne’s head, but his family is always so quick to jump the gun and believe the worst of him. The way he worships and loves Anne so deeply just made me all the more angry for them and how they are seen and treated.
The main villain was Anne’s father. That villainous, evil, son-of-a-bitch would rather see his daughter hung, drawn and quartered than married to a ‘filthy half-breed injun’. He stops at nothing, including forced kidnapping, forging asylum papers and a planned forced abortion, to get his way. In the end he kills himself rather than accept he lost to Cord and Anne. In all honesty, he got off way too easy for my liking but he is dead so that is better than him living out the rest of the story. Anne’s older brother and mother (well more so the brother) were down right evil and vile to me in the first 3/4 of the book but they both had their own character arcs and towards the end reconciled with Anne and Cord and in my head, after some time, all will be well between them.
All in all, this book was so good I’ll be thinking about it for days, maybe even a couple of weeks. It really makes you think about the realities of racial discrimination and injustice. It is going on my shelf of books in my hall of fame that I have such a strong emotional attachment to like Flowers from the Storm, Nakoa’s Woman and Annie’s Song. I NEED this book in physical form so I can cry over it some more when I’m an old, decrepit woman with huge bifocals. Time to go nurse my frazzled emotions back to health.
Rating: Off the charts