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lederhosenRey picked this up during AussieCon and I read it during our holiday in NZ.
The premise has potential: humankind is besieged by hordes of demons who materialise from the ground each night. They can be held back by wards, but these need to be drawn carefully and don't work if smudged/covered/etc. Human civilisation seems to be gradually breaking down under this, with death rate exceeding replacement.
Enter Arlen, a child with Future Hero stamped all over him. He runs away from home after his father's fear leads to his mother's death, and sets out to become a badass. He's already an expert at warding, and with a couple of time compression montages he soon becomes an expert in spear-fighting, horse-riding, and various other things. Sometimes we don't even bother with the montage, just mentioning in backstory that oh, he also learned hand-to-hand fighting from the We're Not Going To Call Them Arab tribesmen.
Then about three-quarters of the way through the book he comes up with an idea that any rational person should have thought of approximately 300 years previously, finds a couple of cheat codes that let him activate godmode, and acquires a super-trained warhorse named Twilight Dancer. No, really, that is its actual name.
We also have two deputy heroes, Musical Guy and Healer Girl. I didn't find them very interesting, and in the case of Healer Girl this is probably a good thing...
It occurs to me that for all Eragon's many failings, I should give Paolini credit for managing to write a fantasy novel without rape in it.* (You may or may not want to skip the rest of this paragraph.) Healer Girl spends most of the book enduring sexual harassment, travelling with a guy who tries to rape her every night, and then near the end her luck runs out and she gets gang-raped by bandits. She is distressed about this for slightly less than a week, then has sex with Hero Dude and gets over it. Bleah.
Then we have the Climactic Battle At The End Of Book One, followed by a paragraph of BTW There Will Be At Least Two More Books. The story still has some potential to get interesting, depending on what he does with it, and since this was his first novel it's quite possible that will happen. But I don't really feel motivated to follow it; I have a lot of Stross to catch up on.
*My views on this are complex, and I don't know that I can articulate them very well as yet, but I'll try to give the short version. I don't have an issue with rape in fiction per se, either in serious treatments or as erotica written for people who can tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
I think what I object to is the unthinking use of rape as filler, which is what it felt like here - author needs to occupy a few pages between demon attacks and give the hero a reason to get mad and kill somebody.
The premise has potential: humankind is besieged by hordes of demons who materialise from the ground each night. They can be held back by wards, but these need to be drawn carefully and don't work if smudged/covered/etc. Human civilisation seems to be gradually breaking down under this, with death rate exceeding replacement.
Enter Arlen, a child with Future Hero stamped all over him. He runs away from home after his father's fear leads to his mother's death, and sets out to become a badass. He's already an expert at warding, and with a couple of time compression montages he soon becomes an expert in spear-fighting, horse-riding, and various other things. Sometimes we don't even bother with the montage, just mentioning in backstory that oh, he also learned hand-to-hand fighting from the We're Not Going To Call Them Arab tribesmen.
Then about three-quarters of the way through the book he comes up with an idea that any rational person should have thought of approximately 300 years previously, finds a couple of cheat codes that let him activate godmode, and acquires a super-trained warhorse named Twilight Dancer. No, really, that is its actual name.
We also have two deputy heroes, Musical Guy and Healer Girl. I didn't find them very interesting, and in the case of Healer Girl this is probably a good thing...
It occurs to me that for all Eragon's many failings, I should give Paolini credit for managing to write a fantasy novel without rape in it.* (You may or may not want to skip the rest of this paragraph.) Healer Girl spends most of the book enduring sexual harassment, travelling with a guy who tries to rape her every night, and then near the end her luck runs out and she gets gang-raped by bandits. She is distressed about this for slightly less than a week, then has sex with Hero Dude and gets over it. Bleah.
Then we have the Climactic Battle At The End Of Book One, followed by a paragraph of BTW There Will Be At Least Two More Books. The story still has some potential to get interesting, depending on what he does with it, and since this was his first novel it's quite possible that will happen. But I don't really feel motivated to follow it; I have a lot of Stross to catch up on.
*My views on this are complex, and I don't know that I can articulate them very well as yet, but I'll try to give the short version. I don't have an issue with rape in fiction per se, either in serious treatments or as erotica written for people who can tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
I think what I object to is the unthinking use of rape as filler, which is what it felt like here - author needs to occupy a few pages between demon attacks and give the hero a reason to get mad and kill somebody.
