Entirely Different: A Review of Brisingr

I often have a lot of opinions about things, especially after I've finished a book or something of that nature. If I continue to write reviews of book and the like, I might choose to develop a different blog for that, but as is stands I have only written this one review. Looking deeper at it I do realize that it is more a review of 3 books rather then the merely the one I finished most recently. Sorry to put such a long winded disclaimer prior to this entry, I just want to make it clear to anyone who might read this later (most likely merely the author himself) that I have shifted focus away from a travel narrative.

I generally enjoyed reading Brisingr, but I was left feeling this was a stop-gap book with really nothing important added to the story. We learned a great deal about Paolini: he has improved his skill at drawing characters; he is well aware that he has a captive audience so he can fail to edit his book and make it dry as toast at points. We also learned that he “interject” obscure words into a sentence to make the story sound more intelligent rather then worrying about the flow the sentence itself. The development of Eragon as a character seems to be secondary to all these new ideas Paolini has pushed into the series. The flow of the story was good and one thing lead to another, but why did we have development of other characters like Roran then magically mysteriously disappear in the last quarter of the book?

I honestly preferred Eldest. It was a great leap forward in the right direction from Eragon. Where as Eragon pretty obliviously had no outline and the author was apprehensive throughout that he would not make it to the end, the Eldest was everything Eragon wasn’t. That is why Brisingr is so disappointing, it’s needless long, well over 700 pages, though I generally enjoyed the experience the beginning was laughable with awkward sentence structure and with words in places that barely made sense. Why use an obscure word just because you can? Also descriptions are only good when they relate to something a reader already knows something about… what size exactly is a “winter rutabaga”?

This is the third book in this series I had expected better things by this point, not the author to become so self-possessed with his own descriptions. The last would do better to lean more toward the Eldest rather then this overly wordy in-need of a diet fantasy installment.