* - this much of a star rating mainly in consideration of how entertaining I found it to find the blatant parallels between Eragon and Star Wars
Eragon is the story of a provincial farm boy, much given to asking blatantly obvious redundant questions to give the other characters a chance to pontificate, who through some odd coincidence turns up a dragon's egg while he is out hunting. Despite having heard stories of dragons and dragon riders his entire life, he does not recognize the egg, or when it hatches the dragon as such, which goes to demonstrate his approximate intelligence for most of the novel. Seriously, if you happened across a stone that sounds hollow and SQUEAKS, it wouldn't really be that much of a stretch, would it?
The story itself is an odd mish-mash of Star Wars and Tolkien. We have the Uncle murdered by evil minions of the Bad Guy. So Eragon sets off to follow them to avenge his uncle - completely ignoring the fact that these evil minions sole purpose is to find him and then either kill or recruit him (neither of which fall into the 'desired outcome' category). Along the way we're treated to the obligatory broken dominant arm scene; several typical 'oh, I have overreached myself using my amazing never-before-seen talents' moments, very 'force' like pebble-lifting and a whole lot of whining from Eragon being a little adolescent jerk. Finally we're treated to Eragon's brilliant grasp of international trade (much better than that of a merchant) despite the fact that he grew up in a wee village in the middle of nowhere.
In short, Eragon is a wonder-boy who can do practically anything given a few days: beat a swordsman trained from birth, master difficult magic, bless small children...It's unrealistic to the extreme and gets quite irritating.
The writing itself is nothing spectacular. It seems to be quite typical for a 15-year-old. An overuse of adverbs, choppy paragraphs and awkward phrasing, stilted dialogue. It certainly isn't BAD considering his age, but it could have done with some serious editing from someone not related to him or hoping to spare his feelings before publishing. He should have tried his hand at finding his own story, his own characters before he actually got published.
There's MUCH better young adult fantasy out there. I hope that those who are so enthusiastic about this book will turn to some of that next.
