I'll admit it: I'm a glutton for punishment. I trudged through Eragon and found it mediocre at best. And yet I still gave Eldest a try. I was left with the same unimpressive results.

Once again, I found the sory predictable, simple, and cliche. I will grant Paolini some improvement in his writing style (not sure I want to use the word 'maturity') but as a whole it was somewhat better. The characters are still only semi-developed, and once again I found myself not really caring about what happened to any of them.

I don't want to say that the story is completely without merit... there is a semi-surprising twist at the end and on a very basic level I did find myself a little curious as to what would happen next. As with Eragon, as long as you aren't expecting great, ground-breaking fantasy literature, then this book makes for very easy reading without making much of an impression.

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