Review Detail

I'm a sucker for dragons, I have to admit. The very idea of them is irresistible to me, so my opinion should have been partial towards this book by default.

My main problem with this book is that it's almost exactly like the Lord of the Rings. And some of the names feel like a reversal of other name with slightly different vowels.
Ra'zac and Za'roc

also where is it written that fantasy novels must contain names with apostrophes in them?

Eragon, that sounds like... I don't know .. Aragorn?
and la dee dah whaddaya know he has a magic sword too..

SO boy finds a dragon egg, becomes a dragon rider. But shhh, it's a secret! Dagon riders are illegal unless they serve the evil king of the empire, (no idea why he isn't just called the emperor), Galbatorix.

The empire learns of his existence and retaliates by burning down his home, killing his uncle/stepfather in the process.

So far so good except for the fact that Eragon's narrative switches from farm boy in alternate world of fantastical creatures to regular fifteen year old. Sometimes his speech isn't as old-timey as it should be.

Eragon decides to journey on to avenge his uncle with his dragon and the town's old storyteller, Brom, who seems to know more that he's letting on.

A whole lot of absolutely nothing happens for a good 200 pages. It's a total snooze fest.. Eragon's narrative is 70 percent descriptions of scenery in a blasphemous attempt to be more TOLKIEN. which would be fine had he actually pulled it off but he didn't. I would read entire passages of this stuff without even knowing that my brain had automatically tuned it out, only to wake up when he starts getting back to the actual plot.

At some point during the journey Eragon is presented with the first opportunity to establish himself as a worthy protagonist. He is asked to solve a problem; Brom and Eragon discover that the ra'azak may have a way of traveling quickly using winged horses (no lie) and thus they have no way of outrunning them or at least catching up to them.

And instead of bedazzling us with the main character's mad problem solving skills, Christopher Paolini has him take a walk and (literally) stumble upon the solution. That was when I decided I wasn't going to read the following books in this series. If the hero is just going to be given the easy way out every time, I've got better things to do with my time.

Now if you ask me, this whole mess could have been avoided if Eragon had just gotten on his dragon and flown around looking for the Ra'azak but instead he and Brom use horses while there's a perfectly fine dragon accompanying them; flying uselessly over their heads.

There is no shame in being "affected" by another writer's work, especially a work as powerful and influential as the lord of the rings; once every maybe 100 years an author like Tolkein or JK Rowling will come along and write something so spectacularly original and all consuming that several tens of generations of authors will be influenced by it and strife to measure up to its glory.

However, it's an entirely different matter to copy another book almost exactly with different names. When you do that you force readers to make the comparison between you and R R Tolkein.. Do you really want to be compared to him? He is the supreme master of high fantasy. Any answer to the previous question that's not a clear and resounding NO is wrong