Brenan's Reviews > Eldest

I think Eldest can best be summed up as follows:

*Eragon travels to Ellesmera to train with the Elves*

*100 pages later...*

*200 pages later...*

*300 pages later...*

*400 pages later...*



*600 pages later, FINALLY Eragon leaves the Elves and exciting things start happening*

Don't get me wrong, I think Eragon's transition from an ordinary kid who found a dragon to a full-fledged Rider via training with the Elves is necessary. Eldest is a "transition period," so it's not going to be as exciting as Eragon was. If you think about the whole series as if it were one book, the beginning (namely, Eragon) was super exciting to grab our attention. Then we enter the first part of the middle (Eldest) which slows down a bit as the beginning starts connecting to the resolution. In the last part of the middle (Brisingr), if Paolini did things right, the pace will begin to speed up again, and the ending (Inheritance) will be as exciting as the beginning (Eragon), if not more so. This is all very typical.

The problem then is not that Eragon goes to learn from the Elves and the pace slows down, but that it continues at that slow pace for such a very long time. It literally was about 600 pages of Eragon learning from the Elves, which was interesting but not particularly exciting or moving. I think if the book was at least half its size, it wouldn't have been such a chore to push through it. Roran comes into the story again in Eldest (I won't say how or why) and if not for those sections, I doubt I'd have wanted to finish Eldest at all. Whenever the book focused on Eragon's studies again I found myself fervently hoping for another section about Roran very soon.

The ending of Eldest was pretty exciting however, and I wouldn't say Eldest was bad per se (just not particularly amazing either), so I'm still going to continue on to Brisingr and see if things improve.

***LINGUISTICS NOTE***

I'm not going to bother rewritting my review of the "languages" in this series. (If you want my full rant about it see my review of Eragon. I wrote a lot about it there XD)

Suffice it to say that the more ancient "language" I see (and there's lots in Eldest), the more it becomes apparent that the supposed "languages" were built from English by someone lacking linguistic knowledge. They're not conlangs.

However, I still feel this has no bearing on the overall quality of the book itself (it just irks me as I'm majoring in linguistics lol XD) so I didn't include it in my overall rating of Eldest.