I got bored and happened to glance upon the back of Eldest. There I saw a plethora of “praise” for Eldest’s prequel Eragon. I had never bothered to read the “praise” before for any book, so I skimmed through them, and some of the lines I felt I just had to comment on.
“Unusual, powerful, fresh, and fluid. An impressive start to a writing career that’s sure to flourish.” -Booklist, Starred
-Let me just say that the four adjectives used to describe Eragon contain a little too much bravado for the book itself. Unusual and fresh? I think not; the book was littered with all the usual clichés. Powerful? Yes, Eragon was a rather powerful Gary-Stu. Fluid? The book flowed like mud – if Eragon were a movie, the use of the “fade out” transition would be a little overused …oh wait…
“Will appeal to the legions of readers who have been captivated by the Lord of the Rings trilogy.” -School Library Journal
-I don’t think many Lord of the Rings fans will be “captivated” by Eragon because they will open up the book, see the millions of LOTR parallels within the book, and be slightly annoyed. I mean, seriously, Arya is clearly Arwen (speaking of Arwen, there’s also a lake called Ardwen Lake), the history of the elves is extremely similar to LOTR, Orik is Gimli, Brom is Gandalf, Eragon has the weight of the world on his shoulders much like Frodo…all you need is a ring instead of Saphira and a few short humans and you’d have LOTR in a nutshell in Eragon. Also, the last time I checked, the average age of the LOTR fan base is quite a bit higher than the average age of the Inheritance fan base.
“An auspicious beginning to both career and series.” – Publishers Weekly
-Too bad the “auspicious beginning” never proved to be very auspicious, well, at least the series didn’t. It got from the alright to the bad to the ugly. I at least could walk through Eragon and crawl through Eldest, but I was drowning in seas of flamboyant description and boredom in Brisingr.
“Christopher Paolini make[s] literary magic with his precocious debut.” – People
-*Snort* *Choke* What? Literary magic? Precocious? A much used saying around the land of the anti’s is that Eragon is published average fan fiction, which I agree with. Precocious indeed. And now he’s what, 23 I think, yet his writing style hasn’t matured at all. Then again, I don’t think he has either, so I guess I can’t blame his writing style solely then. As for literary magic, I have nothing to say to that. The word choice does make me giggle though.
I then went on to my next least-favorite series: Twilight. One glance at Breaking Dawn’s back cover had me lose faith in humanity very fast.
“[A] near-genius balance of breathtaking romance and action,” -VOYA
-Hm…my memory isn’t the best, but from what I remember, New Moon was where Edward became a dick and thought his actions would be the best and thus moved away for most of the book, was it not? Therefore “breathtaking romance” is not the first way I would describe New Moon because it was the one book in the series that lacked the gooey, sappy romance (for most of the book anyway). Action: oh yea there was definitely some action going on when Bella tried to commit suicide. Anti’s were probably cheering and jumping for joy during that part, but unfortunately she lived. Ah well, you can’t always get what you want in life. Otherwise New Moon was rather monotonous – Bella hung around with Jacob, started to cheat on Edward in her mind, and then became all angsty. I think I summed up a good portion of the book right there, and “breathtaking romance and action” was definitely not used anywhere.
“Move over, Harry Potter.” – USA Today
-’Scuse me? Harry Potter will not budge, thank you very much. Whoever thinks that Eclipse is even slightly capable of overtaking Harry Potter needs to start opening their eyes and looking at reality. Harry Potter is a phenomenon; Twilight is lucky fiction.
“[Meyer is] the world’s most popular vampire novelist since Anne Rice.” – Entertainment Weekly
-Only because Meyer combined aspects of fantasy with drama and the typical teenage girl’s dream. What if Edward had an unsightly mole on his nose? What if he were disabled? What if he actually looked like he was 100? What if he didn’t sparkle? What if he just wasn’t …perfect? *gasp* Do you think Twilight would have the same amount of readers then?
“An exciting page-turner….This tale of tortured demon lovers entices.” – Kirkus
-Ahahaha. They called Bella a tortured demon. Loool. And yea, it definitely is a page-turner, especially when you’re flipping through the pages really fast because you can’t endure the brick of a book any longer and you just want it to end.
What a nice note to end the day on (I wrote this last night before I went to bed). Inheritance and Twilight hate, yay!
PS: I find it funny that people will put “I don’t read” in the “Favorite Books” section of Facebook. Clearly you definitely don’t read because you don’t read anything for school, you don’t read instructions, you don’t read labels at shops, and you don’t read signs while driving your car. And you’re definitely not reading this.
December 9, 2008 at 9:28 pm |
Awhile ago I sat down and read the reviews for Twilight and Eragon, and I died laughing. For both, really, I feel as if they were paid to say good things. That does happen, ya know, and I wouldn’t be surprised. Just some of the things he said…it sounded like they weren’t reading it, that the reviewers, were not paying attention to what they were reading.
“Move over, Harry Potter.” – Isn’t that what they said for the Eragon movie? What, is that the new way of saying something is good? When you say that, people, not only are you setting up the story earning praise, but they are comparing it to something that takes more than just a fantasy genre to overtake.
J.K. Rowling isn’t a perfect writer, but her writing has shown maturity with every new book (though sadly the series is over), and with the last book, she has proven a grand talent in story telling. Though the ending wasn’t what some were expecting, she linked all the books perfectly, and used metaphors, similes, and themes that were powerful, to express the message that she was trying to get through to her readers.
Rowling isn’t the greatest writer on earth, because in reality, no one is “perfect,” but it is a disgrace to her, the story, and the fans, to falsely declare something on equal footing as the Harry Potter series.
December 23, 2008 at 1:10 am |
I <3 this post.
Yet, an important thing to realise is that.. most “teen” genre fiction is going to be sappy, cliche, or downright awful. It’s written in fan fiction style because that’s [surprisingly] what your average typical teen wants to read: a story that’s dramatic without being especially complicated. By not ‘especially complicated’, I mean that it’s perfectly devoid of anything that might leave the personalities of characters and their actions up for deep analysis. After all, if they were into that sort of stuff, they’d just do their required reading of Macbeth for Year 11 English.