I have to give Christopher Paolini his due. Writing a book at fifteen is no easy task… Never mind. I wrote a book when I was fifteen and it wasn’t actually that hard. The book I wrote at fifteen was awful. So is this one. If I had known him personally I would have said this “That’s great that you finished the book, now how about you wait like ten--maybe fifteen years and then rewrite it, once you’ve really developed some skill as a writer?”

I forced myself to finish it just because I had heard from so many very misguided people that it was genius. It’s not. It has some good ideas that are never fully realized within the story, an incredibly annoying whiny-weak-sauce main character and very lame fight scenes. I can’t stand a fantasy novel with lame fight scenes. It was predictable—-which isn’t always the worst thing ever, but in the case of this novel it is just another problem at the top of a heap of reasons to just put it down already. I do remember thinking at one point that it wouldn’t be too difficult to take the novel, chop it up into a couple of bite-sized pieces and then make a script for a movie that wouldn’t be utterly terrible—-but then the movie came out and it was utterly terrible, so... que lastima.