Review Detail

Okay. I'll be honest. This book was not very great. It would have been great if it was about half the length that it was. I could get through Eragon okay, even though it was dry. Eldest? Well, read on... If I say it like this, it sounds okay-ish, listen:

So this book is the sequel to Eragon. Eragon and Saphira travel to Ellesmera to learn more about being a Dragon Rider (in case you didn't know, Ellesmera is where the elves live) and to continue their journey to eventually defeat the tyrant Galbatorix. When he gets there, Eragon is prepared to be teaching himself everything he needs to know, as he thinks he is the last Rider. But there, he meets Ormoris and Gladr, and elvish rider and his dragon prepared to teach Eragon the skills he needs. As the story proceeds, Eragon begins to fall in love with Arya, an elf. Then he discovers the truth about a brother and a father he's never known.

The story had a great plot and story, but, seriously. it was TOO LONG. It literally took Eragon 300 pages to get to Ellesmera, then 300 to get his cousin Roran out of the clutches of the Ra'zaac and run away to Surda. If you do the maths, that leaves only 60 pages to do the cool action of the battle and the reunion of Roran and Eragon. Really?

The descriptions? Just... no. It's a good thing to have detail/good descriptions in a story, but Paolini took it to the point where he spent two paragraphs or even a page talking about what a minor character looked like or what he said. I'm not kidding, you can skip over whole pages and not miss anything because Paolini used the whole page to describe a room. And you can't even, really, imagine what he's trying to show you. For example, in the Hunger Games Collins compared Katniss's dress to candlelight. I got that, I could imagine it. Here, Paolini just rambles on describing EVERYTHING, and you don't really get it because obviously no one is going to imagine exactly what he is imagining, so going for so long about it is pointless. It's like we've got no imagination.

Another thing. I said before that Eragon is falling in love with Arya. But I didn't mention what I'm about to say. Eldest takes place maybe half a year after Eragon finishes, in which Eragon is a young teenager. Except in this book, Eragon acts about 30, and is falling in love with an elf who is obviously way out of his league and a couple of hundred of years older than him!

Okay, now that I've finished with the bad stuff, I can talk about the good stuff now.

I quite liked the made up language. It was maybe a little too detailed on that part, like the rest of the book. Thanks Paolini, we get it. You can make up your own language. Can we move on and not spend like three paragraphs outlining a long spell that could be made shorter by just saying something like "He closed his eyes and chanted a spell, to..." or something.

There was an interesting plot I guess, if you looked past the fact that it took 300 hundred pages to do something that might've taken one hundred if the idea was given to another author to write.

One more thing. Eragon is kind of a mixup of lots of different books and the characters and idea was a bit too cookie-cutter for me. Seriously. If I wanted a paranormal epic battle between the forces of good and evil, I would have read the Lord of the Rings or any other one of those books out there. If I wanted dragons that could talk to humans, I would have read . If I wanted a lone guy facing off a huge empire of evil dudes, I would have watched Star Wars.

So, to sum it up. Paolini would spend one, two or even three pages describing every inch of a room or a minor character, to make sure we saw exactly what he did, which is impossible. Eragon seemed a LOT older than he was supposed to be, and he was falling in love with someone who was way out of his league and very obviously not interested. The made up language was all right, and the plot was quite interesting, if you looked past the fact that it took 300 pages for Eragon to do ANYTHING.

Here's a suggestiong if you are reading it. If the descriptions are getting too long, skip them. You won't miss anything.