What readers think of Eragon, plus links to write your own review.

Boring. Bad prose, no characterization, recycled plot. Its fame comes from the author's supposed age, though people tend to forget he was older than most people assume and had a professional editor. That, and the fact the book was marketed at a bunch of illiterate kids who couldn't tell Charles Dickens from their arse. What are you to expect from a kid whose social interactions are limited to his family, the books he's read, and the movies he watches with his family?

Skip it. There are much better books written by experienced adults who don't get movies and games. But they don't have the fame because they care enough about their works they don't indulge in overused plots and flat characters. And they aren't "fifteen" for the past eight years.

I rate this good even though I have several opinions to the negative. I will not state anything about his age, except that keep in mind his parents are in the editing business. Still I like the book. It was an enjoyable read regardless of the young mentality in the verbiage. It did get better as the book progressed and he got a little experience. However I liked the book for the exact reasons I liked the other books that he stole the ideas from. I see the star wars comparison. Yet nobody mentions that R.A. Salvatore in the demon sword trilogy taught his hero how to practice swordsmanship with an elven dance. Not to mention The Spine is a place mentioned in almost every Icewind Dale book. And by the way did anyone read Raymond Feist? How about Thomas who found the dragon rider armor, and slowly gained powers from it and over time his features changed to resemble those of an elf. Anyway I expect as he gets a little older his own ideas will begin to surface and his writing ability will improve.

The book was actually quite interesting. I would have preferred it if the first half did not involve so much traveling and training. The whole book had so much traveling that it became boring to read about how tired they were and that Paolini should have renamed the book " A Travelogue of Alagaesia", but otherwise it was a great book.

The poor character development, redundant word usage (myriad anyone?) and outright plot theft make this novel, quite simply, bad. Yes, the plots from Harry Potter, LOTR, Star Wars and more were used in combination but what bothered me the most was the outright theft of the idea of an ancient language that contained everything's "true name" from Wizard of Earthsea. This infuriated me and I encourage all of you to read the book and see what a real fantasy novel is like.

I loved the book though i must agree that it did seem a little bit, for lack of a better word copied. Even worse was the fact that the movie had no actual plotline. However the concept is good as is the descriptions as my heart reached out to each character in turn.

Well, it was a real good book, but I ask if it is slightly a knock-off of a mixture of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings books...the magic, dragons...typical fantasy stuff but a little too much like those two books...the main character, Eragon, is a bit like Harry Potter...orphaned, has certain qualities that set him apart from all the others, has magical abilities...sound familiar? To all my readers, sorry about all the dot dot dots(...). It also had some Lord of the Ring type things in it...ok not gonna type them all. Overall, it was excellent, really it was, but it kinda is a typical fantasy story using 2 of the original 7 plots of the world-orphan does amazing things, and rescues the girl(who, in this book, is Ayra) from a terrible death...Anyways, good book, read it, but I warned ya it was kinda knock-off-ish. No offense to Christopher Paolini

I didn't mind the unoriginality (if there is such a word) of the story, because in general, most books lack originality these days, yet they're still enjoyable. The story was intriguing and the world was a colorful one. The writing was admittedly a little more than I could take sometimes--a blatant attempt to imitate the verbose writing styles of the type-authors of today's fantasy novels--but my real issue was the dialogue and characters. I never really fell in love with any of them. Every character seemed a little too similar to some shell of a character with unlikely words falling from his mouth. Eragon was by far the best of them, probably because he spoke the least, but I was definitely disappointed by the lack of soul in them. I hesitate to read the sequel for fear of another let-down, but I do suspect that Mr. Paolini has made improvements over his starter.

If I could make a recommendation to the author, it would be to unpublish his book (were it possible) and edit it with his present knowledge. It had the feel of a second-time rewrite rather than a fleshed-out novel. I suspect he could have done a more thorough job, perhaps this time not driven by the excitement of looming publication.

Even though I cannot deny what people say about how much this book copies off of other fantasy novels, I still enjoyed reading it and it certainly wasn't a waste of time. Especially once I got to the second book, which was better. I anxiously await the third book in the trilogy. My brother and I have both enjoyed this book and I like the characters better than those of some other fantasy novels. There are some good descriptions and though I can see that Paolini is no Tolkien, I take him for what he is. His books are sort of aimed towards kids and young adults, so I don't really think mentioning your IQ in a review is necessary ;)