I found this interesting... from Roger Downey of Seattle Weekly:
"It's a good thing I didn't start my exploration with Paolini; I wasn't expecting a masterpiece from a precocious home-schooled first-time novelist from isolated Paradise Valley, Mont., but I was still deeply disappointed by Eragon and its just-published sequel, Eldest. This lumbering coming-of-age tale of a boy and his dragon is painfully derivative of Tolkien, but it utterly lacks the qualities that raise Lord of the Rings toward greatness: the inexorable movement toward a tragic goal, the moral complexity of the challenges facing its characters, the linguistic decorum, which achieves a clarity and dignity rarely achieved in 20th-century popular fiction. Maybe the thirst for high-flown adventure is great enough among young readers to keep this series going through its third and (please, God) final installment, due in 2007. But if it's going to be worth reading, Paolini had better get the hell out of isolated Paradise Valley and learn something—anything—about the world outside of books."
"It's a good thing I didn't start my exploration with Paolini; I wasn't expecting a masterpiece from a precocious home-schooled first-time novelist from isolated Paradise Valley, Mont., but I was still deeply disappointed by Eragon and its just-published sequel, Eldest. This lumbering coming-of-age tale of a boy and his dragon is painfully derivative of Tolkien, but it utterly lacks the qualities that raise Lord of the Rings toward greatness: the inexorable movement toward a tragic goal, the moral complexity of the challenges facing its characters, the linguistic decorum, which achieves a clarity and dignity rarely achieved in 20th-century popular fiction. Maybe the thirst for high-flown adventure is great enough among young readers to keep this series going through its third and (please, God) final installment, due in 2007. But if it's going to be worth reading, Paolini had better get the hell out of isolated Paradise Valley and learn something—anything—about the world outside of books."
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