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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44659.Pawn_of_Prophecy?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Pawn of Prophecy (The Belgariad, Book 1)" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1170267561m/44659.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44659.Pawn_of_Prophecy?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Pawn of Prophecy</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8732.David_Eddings">David Eddings</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4785609?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> Review here for the entire Belgariad. <br/> <br/>I noticed that most of the reviewers give this a nostalgic loved-this-when-I-was-young rating. And they're right to do so. This is the perfect series of books for a young reader: clever enough to hold its own, exciting without being too graphic, and the youth don't notice just how bad the prose is. <br/> <br/>I mean, it's hilariously bad. It's not that the Eddings machine can't write for beans; it's that the writing does all the hackneyed nasty cliched things that you're supposed to get out of your system sometime shortly after high school. (For an effective drinking game, swig every time Eddings writes a Tom Swifty - ("I can't swallow this peach," Garion choked.) Or just sip; it happens on every page so you'll drink your share either way) <br/> <br/>On rereading, though, two things struck me other than the bad prose. The first is, the characteriations are really swift, moving directly and smoothly from "yes you care about this person" to "this is what's happening to this person", usually in a couple paragraphs. Drawing parallels for me to the adventure novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The brevity of the characetrizations are a real strength. The second thing I noticed was that there was something else going on here; glimpses of a cosmology of wonder and fascination beyond the play of the story itself. It was as though, every once in a while, the bottom dropped out of the floor and you realized you were in the midst of the ambitious project of an undiscovered author, the one thing he cares about more than anything else, and you have a front-row seat to teh story he wants to tell, yes, but more importantly you can see him constructing the stage props by hand in the wings, scrambling for everything he can get his hands on, and by some happy accident conjuring a genie that grants his greatest wish. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/289098?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>