12.31.2005
Eldest
by Christopher Paolini, 668 pgs, hardcover
Overall Grade: D+
Paolini gets the plus for his sheer ordacity to follow up his crummy first novel with another equally large, if not larger, piece of drivel. Some publisher must honestly be way too easily impressed by the author's age when he cranked out his first work to notice how terrible it was. And this is some from a reading of the finer children's fantasy of today. Anyway, this book continues the plot of the first with Eragon & his dragon Saphira off to get trained by the Elves and then are called back for the first large-scale confrontation. It annoys me to no end to see Paolini steal devices and story parts from just about everywhere right and left. If you could shake everything out of the book except its original bits, the book would be like 1/6, maybe 1/10 the size. I have to give him props for not giving away his oh-too-obvious surprise at the end though. Seriously, not worth it. Go read 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy or 'The Hobbit' for dragons and elves or Harry Potter for that matter, geeez.
Labels: genre: fantasy, genre: fiction, genre: YA, media: book, series: Eragon
