Eragon by: Christopher Paolini

Eragon
by Christopher Paolini
Date Released: August 26, 2003
Pages: 503

Summary:

When young Eragon finds a polished blue stone in the forest, he thinks it is the lucky discovery of a poor farm boy; perhaps it will buy his adopted family meat for the winter. But when the stone brings a dragon hatchling, Eragon realizes he has stumbled upon a legacy nearly as old as the Empire itself. Overnight his simple life is shattered, and he is thrust into a perilous new world of inescapable destiny, magical forces, and powerful people. With only an ancient sword and the instruction of an old,mysterious, hermit storyteller for guidance, Eragon and the fledgling dragon must navigate the dangerous terrain and dark enemies of an Empire ruled by a Emperor whose evil and power knows no bounds. Can Eragon take up the mantle of the legendary Dragon Riders? The fate of the Empire may rest in his hands…

My Review:

So I just finished Eragon and I was reading some of the reviews people wrote on Goodreads and the majority of the ones written by people who gave the book 1 star, made me really mad. Let's just get one thing straight. ERAGON SHOULD NOT BE COMPARED TO LORD OF THE RINGS. So many people were pointing out the similarities between these two books. So I am going to address some of these right now that I find ridiculous, but before I do, I am going to go ahead and make a list of the similarities I found when reading the book.
1. Aragorn and Eragon (the names not the characters)
2. Arwen and Arya
and 3. they presence of elves, men, and dwarves all together in one story
That is it, I found nothing else. So onto the silly comparisons:

1: They are both trilogies. Okay seriously. That is the first thing you list, that are both trilogies. I can list so many other trilogies. The Hunger Games series, The Darkest Powers series, The Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy, The Modern Faerie Tales, His Dark Materials, I could go on. So having this as a basis for a comparison between Eragon and Lord of the Rings is just showing that you really have no argument.

2. Main character Aragorn/Eragon. This argument is a much stronger argument than the previous one, but if some one asked me: Who are the main characters in these two books my immediate answers would be; Eragon: Eragon and Saphira. LOTR: Frodo and Gandalf. My immediate response would not be 'Well the main characters are Eragon, and OMG Aragorn. Look at that, Paolini obviously copied Tolkein.

3. Bad flying things Ra'zac/Ringwraiths. Okay, so I'm not going to mention the wording of this one (bad flying things, seriously?) but if this is their comparison they obviously aren't as familiar with LOTR as they think because Ringwraiths isn't their actual name. So their comparison should say 'Bad flying things Ra'zac/Nazgul. And come on, we can all say that isn't a good comparison.

4. There is a big fight in the troll dungeons. I'm sorry, but there aren't even trolls in Eragon so how in the world would there be a big fight in the troll dungeons? And I will admit, there are trolls in Lord of the Rings, so *snaps* for getting that part right, but (and my friend, an avid fan of both of these books, agrees with me) I have no memory of any fight in a troll dungeons, I don't even think troll dungeons were mentioned in the book. I mean there was that kind of medium sized fight in the Mines of Moria, but that was where the dwarves lived.

Some people also complained about the way Paolini wrote and other things like that but one thing that someone said really made me mad. One reviewer was going on about why it was so horrible that he put the map in three different languages. They didn't understand why someone would do that because our maps in the real world are all in one language, not multiple (they used the example that ours don't say The United States and then in parenthesis Los Estados Unidos, they just say The United States). Well if you think about the only thing in consistently in one language on our maps are country names, but the city stay in their native language. For example, the capital of Bolivia is La Paz. For an American map, they aren't going to translate the city names so it says Peace instead of La Paz. That's just stupid.

So, if you haven't read Eragon, ignore the bad reviews because it is an amazing book.

My Rating: