NovelCritic

I promised a reader that I would review Eldest , the sequel to Eragon and the second book in the Inheritance Trilogy by Christopher Paolini. I’m a little late in delivering that, but here it is.

If you have read my review on Eragon, you’ll notice that I said the beginning of Eragon was pretty slow but it picked up to a brilliant conclusion.

Well, Eldest is even slower on the uptake than Eragon. In fact, I seriously considered just abandoning the book to read something more exciting.

Since I am writing this review, I obviously didn’t abandon the book. I plodded through the first half of the book and finally got to where it started to pick up.

You have to understand that Eragon has been severely injured (but to not give too much away for people who have not read the first book or seen the movie, I won’t say how). He is expected to be this leader, and he doesn’t have the physical ability to do that any more. Needless to say, Eragon was in pain, and I was in some pain reading the painfully slow account of his pain and his attempts to deal with it.

Christopher Paolini may not do very well as keeping the whole story interesting and fun to read (and neither did J.R. Tolkien, for that matter), but he sure knows how to finish a story. The ending for Eldest is probably as good as Eragon, but it had an added twist that I didn’t see coming (but probably should have).

If you read the first book, you really have to read the second book. I promise that the ending is worth it, so plow your way through the slow stuff until it starts becoming fun to read.

The ending really is worth it.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS