purplecat | Eldest (Reply)

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When I reviewed Eragon I said I wouldn't be reading the rest of the trilogy. However when my SiL discovered I hadn't read this she thrust it upon me. My SiL had never read a book until she met B's brother and still isn't the sort of person who habitually has at least one book "on the go" at any one time. So, as B says, you have to have respect for a book that gets her enthused. All that said I feel much the same about Eldest as I did about Eragon with the additional caveat that Eldest substitutes events for training sequences and so the novel no longer really benefits from the virtue of paciness. On the plus side Paolini has resisted the temptation to make Eragon's mentor into a "quirky" yoda-esque figure for which I think we should be grateful. Don't get me wrong, Yoda is great, but I'm not sure I could have taken 200 pages of a thinly disguised Yoda rip-off. The book, of course, ends with the "I am your father" scene - only in this case it's "I am your brother"; the Princess Leia part having been conveniently split between Eragon's (male) best friend and an unobtainable Elven princess thus avoiding all the uncomfortable issues raised in Star Wars about lusting over your sister. Though I'm sure the slash writers have ably filled the void thereby left in the tale.

At the end of the day its still a readable novel and, despite my complaints about the training sequences, a relatively pacy one. On the downside its roots are still painfully obvious. As before, I'm more interested to see what Paolini is writing in 10 years time than in reading the rest of this triolgy.

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purplecat

May 2025

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