Customer Reviews: Read 121 more reviews...
 An excellent read... why disect it? June 21, 2008
B. Obank
I thoroughly enjoyed reading 'Eragon' and 'Eldest' and I am sure that I will enjoy 'Brisingr' when it is released; in my mind that's all that matters. While I am happy to acknowledge the similarites that it has with many other fantastic novels, I do not believe that these similarities detract from the books.
Many people who have reviewed this seem obsessed with disecting the book, focusing on which parts are similar to other books and so on, but surely if a book is entertaining to read, then it has fufilled it's purpose. Books are not written to be analysed, they are written to be enjoyed.
To conclude, if you want to read a book simply to bask in it's literary genius and ingenuity, then walk away, but if you read for pleasure, then buy it and enjoy a fantastic read.
P.S. The film is terrible...please don't bother with it.
 Absolutely fantastic!!! June 8, 2008
Anja Schmidt (Denmark)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Boy, how I loved this book, and the next one... I could hardly put them down, and only did so because I had to go to work, so I didn't get much sleep for a little week... but the books are amazing, as simply as that!!
 Use a dictionary May 31, 2008
Mr. R. S. Keys (Aberdeen)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I read this to my children, who found the story exciting, BUT... they frequently had to wait until I stopped laughing! Yes, this book manages to be funny! Paolini likes to use nice sounding phrases, but without any regard for their meaning. I love absurdities. The blurb says it all, when we are told that at 16, he has an 'abiding' love of fantasy! But it is a bit long for the same joke - the comic misuse of words shouldn't extend over so many pages. The plot - a character goes from situation to situation, like in a computer game, on and on and on. We are told that he develops, which is useful, as we don't experience it.
I can't believe I used to be a fan of this. May 17, 2008
Lin. Family (UK)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I first read this when I was about 9, and it was great to me at the time. I'd finished the Harry Potter series up to that point, so I hungered for more fantasy. The dragon on the cover drew me in and spat me out, covered in the saliva of unoriginality.
After I read it, I started to write, and went through the same process that Paolini did when writing Eragon - I stole the plot, threw it into somebody else's world, changed the characters' names and then wrote them into being more shallow and clichéd, and overall spun a horrible, messy web of purple prose from this.
To sum up the previous paragraph, as other people pointed out, Eragon is Lucas' plot in Tolkien's world, only bastardised.
I decided to re-read it recently and I have to say, what I used to think was a brilliant, vibrant, gripping tale managed to bore and irritate me within minutes, and I kept going, only out of search for something I might have enjoyed.
Don't buy this. As an adult, you won't enjoy it, and don't buy it for your child, since it'll mess up their grades in English.
Not new ... but not cheated May 6, 2008
Phillipa Brookes (Leicester, UK)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I chose this book as I was missing a regular instalment of elves, dwarves and dragons ...Having read Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter & Northern Lights over the past couple of years, I didn't find much new in Eragon. However, it is a fast, engaging and straightforward read: partly because the story doesn't have the complexity of the LOTR or the innovation of Northern Lights. In some points, the sentence construction is a little unusual and it should have been possible to name people and place without the similarities to LOTR. However, at no point did I feel cheated by this. Eragon is a good story, told well.
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