swankivy

• Rated 2 stars

“This one had a little less of the annoying factor compared to the first volume because it wasn't constantly smacking you over the head with exposition, but more information about the premise filtered in during this volume and it rubbed me the wrong way. It's insinuated that the Fables--people from alternate worlds who got chased from their fictional worlds to hide among the "mundanes" (ugh) in our world--have a definite understanding of themselves being story characters and that it matters to them how often the so-called mundanes tell their stories. (For instance, Rose Red is jealous of Snow White for being more well-known, and it's suggested that the better-known you are, the easier it is for you to survive, say, a gunshot wound to the head. Gee.) Yet, when the various Three Little Pigs die, it doesn't matter that they replaced them with three more little pigs for the normal people to believe in without knowing the originals got killed. I don't get it, especially since that whole switch-a-roo was played like the audience was gonna go "oooh, deep." (I felt the same about several "reveals" throughout the story.) The whole civil war plot and the way Snow White and Rose Red ended up at the Animal Farm seemed really contrived to me, too. Though I must say Goldilocks having a consummate relationship with one of the Three Bears made me chuckle.”

swankivy wrote this review 9 days ago. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“A friend thought I'd like this because I guess it has some common threads with Sandman (which I adore), but so far it has yet to be anywhere near as dramatic, innovative, and authentic as Neil Gaiman's masterpiece. So a bunch of fictional characters from the various stories we know and love have been exiled from their fairytale homelands (by a mysterious adversary, motives unknown), and now they live secretly among regular people, with their own place for people like them called Fabletown. (They refer to themselves as "Fables.") A detective story featuring the murder of Rose Red is the motivating force in the action, and various reinvented characters play suspects, victims, and sleuths. This graphic novel pushed about a dozen of my pet peeve buttons immediately.

1. Severe overuse of characters lighting a cigarette to show off how hard-boiled they are.

2. Cameo nonsense. Some people might find the repeated references to fairy tales enjoyable, but I definitely felt beaten over the head. "Hi Jack. Climbed any beanstalks lately?" You know, so we'll know which Jack this is. "Never mention the dwarves" being a warning about what you just don't say to Snow White. Etc.

3. Overuse of emphasis with bold lettering. I'm thinking this might be a comic thing that I'm just oversensitive to since I tend not to read a whole lot of American graphic novels, but anytime something was either stressed or significant, it was bolded. It got tiring.

4. For some reason I get really annoyed when regular people, whatever "regular" people are in some fantastical reality, are called "mundanes." In this series, not only are normal people called mundanes, but they're called "mundys" for short. Just something I'm tired of.

5. Critical levels of as-you-know-Bob. Characters' pasts are filled in with awkward dialogue. "You remember when you did such and such?" / "Shut up, you can't hold that against me, that was before the amnesty!" Or Snow White feels prompted to explain exactly how the balance of power works between the "actual" mayor of Fabletown (King Cole) and herself (second-in-command) because someone she's talking to points out that she's not the mayor. Occasionally this is lampshaded ("Your sister, Rose Red." "I'm not entirely an idiot. I actually know my own sister's name."--that sort of thing), but I had shoehorned-in exposition squirting out my ears before the first chapter was over.

Add in the fact that I'm not a fan of detective stories anyway--especially "and this is how I figured it all out" endings--and you get to conclude I didn't care for this. The art itself was fine, though sometimes the emotion seemed detached from the dialogue. I'm still going to read the second one because a) sometimes comics get better as they relax into their world, and b) my friend lent me both, so I'll read both. ”

swankivy wrote this review 2 days ago. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“There was so much that was good about this book. I appreciated that Melody, a girl with cerebral palsy who can't speak, had her own imperfections (beyond her disability) and wasn't written as a complete saint--that's a pitfall many authors can't seem to avoid when trying to write a book like this from the perspective of a disabled child. Melody is smart as a whip but needs help to communicate and has almost no control over her body, and yet many of the people responsible for her education weren't willing to accept her abilities for what they really are. I liked that there were so many varieties of reactions to her--that many of her classmates may have been outright rude and cruel to her, but many of them were in gray areas . . . meaning they said and did a lot of the right things but did so out of apparent feelings of obligation, not because they wanted to.

I liked how realistic the mainstreaming experience was for Melody, and I liked that her time in the disabled class was clearly just babysitting (because that totally happens in school all the time). And I liked that sometimes when bad things happened, the story didn't swoop in and pull out a miracle solution to make everything okay again. The author let disaster strike and then let the characters further show their colors by dealing with it.

There were a few things I didn't like, but most of it was just delivery. There were a couple places where I thought Melody made some insensitive comments about fat people (commenting mentally that someone's belly was "gross" or suggesting people's large size as automatically unflattering). The narration flipped from past tense to present tense pretty much arbitrarily, though it did it in chunks or between chapters so it wasn't particularly distracting. I thought the children sometimes spoke too maturely--for instance, a fifth grader is quoted as saying "It never occurred to me that Melody had thoughts in her head." I taught elementary school and even though obviously some of the children had advanced vocabulary, they didn't tend to talk like this; sometimes it just didn't sound natural. There was one bit that felt planted: when Melody's sister is pointed out to have a tendency to run out the door to try to get in the car, I knew it would be important and I knew however it would be important would be dangerous, so I just kept waiting for it to happen. But except for these small things, I found it an enjoyable read and I thought Melody was a fascinating character, and the storytelling style was innovative.

I cried a little when one of the first things Melody did when she got her talking machine was tell her parents she loved them.”

swankivy wrote this review Tuesday, January 17, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

8 of 8 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 1 stars

“This is my ABRIDGED VERSION of my essay/review about Inheritance by Christopher Paolini. The long version is on my website.

So let's break format and start with what I liked.

This was my favorite of the Inheritance series. It was enough less of a chore to read than Brisingr that I very nearly considered rating this two stars out of five. But then I realized I was thinking that way based on hating it less rather than liking it more, and figured that objectively I'm afraid it still deserves a bottom-of-the-barrel rating. Sorry, fans.

First off, Paolini corrected a number of things that he's had trouble with in previous volumes. He introduced horses that actually get tired. He introduced characters who dislike the protagonists and don't automatically get written as evil or get punished for it. He acknowledged that the elf Arya would be a better fighter than plucky farm boy Eragon owing to over a century of practice. He wrote a couple of conversations that felt like conversations. There was no Super Special explanation for why Cousin Roran was such a badass. Nobody got brought back to life in a cheesy touching resurrection. [spoiler]And Eragon didn't get married and live happily ever after (or turn out to be related to Princess Leia).[/spoiler]

But what I appreciated most about this book was that it managed to evoke real emotions sometimes--and what the characters went through wasn't always completely one-dimensional. I felt less like I was being fed lines and more like what the characters experienced was actually born from their situations combined with their mindsets. There was some decent human emotion describing Eragon's self-doubt, inner conflicts, sorrow, and crushing fear under his great responsibility. Roran's protectiveness and savagery as a man of war worked for me too (when it wasn't weird or over the top).

Paolini regularly tried way too hard and forced the emotions until they turned into cloying thesaurus poop, but sometimes he did okay. (There were also certain bits that I realized I felt the way I did because of my personal experiences; in other words, at times I brought my own emotions to the table instead of actually being affected by the words, much like a fanboy loves a dragon no matter how poorly it's written.) Eragon has a "This Used To Be My Playground" moment. I'm a sucker for that, because I'm a huge nostalgic hippie.

Eragon's philosophizing moments and contradictory feelings were sometimes organic and they worked. It mostly just made me sad that this happened so rarely in the book. This kinda made it seem like he has the capability to . . . maybe . . . evoke emotion in his writing, even though he almost never hits the bullseye. The thing he really needs to learn is how and when to back off. Emotional evocation is easy. Humans do it eagerly when they read. Just get out of the way, Paolini. Get out of the way of yourself.

But let's get on to why you guys actually want to read my essays. All the stuff I hate!

The biggest problem is still the obnoxious decoration. Sentences aren't Christmas trees. Stop decorating them.

Even at this late stage, Paolini hasn't improved his tone-deaf prose or his tendency to decorate awkward sentences instead of pruning them. We still constantly encounter overdescription--and not just of weapons and clothes and faces and courtyards, but unneeded comparisons of perfectly good images to other things in a ham-fisted attempt to enhance them. We can picture post-battle smoke as viewed from the sky just fine without being told that it "hung over Belatona like a blanket of hurt, anger, and sorrow," and it would actually be more poignant if he would stop forcing these associations onto every image. Let us feel it ourselves. Stop telling us what every cloud of smoke "means."

If just about every time an image pops up, the reader has to put up with comparisons and weird personification, and we get seasick. A little of this is okay. Weaving it into EVERY SENTENCE is not. Having no natural understanding of voice and tone and no knack for writing character cannot be amended or hidden through excessive adjective insertion. Whenever I read a Paolini book, I feel like I was promised a comfortable shirt and was given an ill-fitting, scratchy garment whose tailor elected to "fix" its flaws with a frigging Bedazzler.
Some particularly egregious examples:

* we would fall before him like dry leaves before a winter storm
* the dragons' blood rained from the sky like a summer downpour
* her small pink tongue was visible; it lay like a soft, moist slug
* musty aroma clung to the girl, like the smell of a forest floor on a warm summer day
* which seemed to press against Roran like a thick, heavy blanket made of the most unpleasant substance he could imagine
* the plume of dancing water, which glittered like handfuls of diamonds tossed into the air
* the bags under her eyes like small, sad smiles
* with eyes like chips of obsidian
* Blood trailed from the tip in long, twisting ribbons that slowly separated into glistening drops, like orbs of polished coral
* there emerged Thorn, red as blood and glittering like a million shifting stars
* The passageway smelled like damp straw and moth wings
* an overwhelming sense of dread clutched at Eragon, pressing down on him like a pile of sodden fleeces
* putting each morsel of food into her mouth as carefully as if it were a hollow orb of glass that might shatter at any sudden movement
* he thought the mountains looked like so many molars erupting from the brown gums of the earth

The description also occurs at very inappropriate times. It consistently interrupts the action, resulting in situations like having a man running toward Eragon urgently, only to pause for two paragraphs while the man, his family, their history, and philosophy surrounding these folks is imparted to us in indulgent narration. There's also an annoying pattern Paolini had in just under half the chapters: Some sort of action opens the chapter, and then we get at least a paragraph of description of the surroundings. If that didn't happen, more often than not we got a flashback that led up to whatever the current situation was. It got very repetitive.

And speaking of repetitive, Paolini has been doing this thing where he latches onto a certain phrase and keeps using it. For example:

* Relief and trepidation swept through Eragon.
* Relief swept through Eragon.
* As his hand closed around the hilt, a sense of relief swept through him.
* Relief swept through Eragon as he saw his cousin alive and well.
* An urge to strike the king swept through Roran.
* Dismay swept through Eragon.
* Eragon watched for a minute longer, then a sudden rush of emotion swept through him.
* Wonder swept through Eragon, wonder that such a thing had come to pass.

Add that to all the metaphors of leaves getting swept away in a storm of some sort, and this book just starts getting silly to read. Other overused words include "crimson" (nearly 50 times) and "growled" (regularly overused as a speech tag). At one point Eragon says "How is it you keep besting me?" and the speech tag is "he growled, far from pleased." Got that? He's growling. And far from pleased. Because Arya is beating him at sword-fighting. I'm sure you needed to know that this did not please him, in case the angry phrase itself and the GROWLING didn't tell you enough yet. And just in case you were wondering, we get a paragraph of detail on Eragon's thumbs. Is your life complete now?

Narrating the sacred

Paolini spends far too long on an irrelevant scene in which Saphira flies them through a storm for no real good reason, and we're treated to several "poetic" pages full of descriptions of the beautiful post-storm night sky. The serenity and power of his observations is yanked away immediately as Paolini begins to narrate to us what exactly this is supposed to "mean" to Eragon. He babbles on for a while and then hands down a trite little revelation about how people probably wouldn't fight each other anymore if they could see what he's seen. It cheapens it so much.

You know what would have driven home the majesty and beauty he was going for?

Some freakin' silence.

Don't narrate the sacred, okay? Just invoking an image and then leaving us to marinate in that would have actually been good storytelling--a good character-building lesson in perspective for Eragon. Instead, we get a litany of hollow platitudes yammered into our ears, rambling about how small he'd once thought the world was and how big it seemed now, and specific ways in which he "was once an ant is now an eagle" or some crap, and on and on about how he's reorienting his life because of this perspective shift.

Bad Dialogue:

"And to what do we owe the unexpected pleasure of this visit, Your Highness? Werecats have always been noted for their secrecy and their solitude, and for remaining apart from the conflicts of the age, especially since the fall of the Riders. One might even say that your kind has become more myth than fact over the past century. Why, then, do you now choose to reveal yourselves?"

Thank you, Ms. Exposition!

There's this thing called "As you know, Bob." This is bleedingly, horrifyingly terrible exposition. It is so written that it's insulting.
Silly dialogue is also frequently praised by other characters, proving once again that even Paolini's characters love Paolini.

Here are a few lines of dialogue I thought were ridiculous:

"These are customs older than time itself." [No they're not.]

"I fight to win, not to lose. . . . " [I can't imagine why.]

"Nor do I want to sit alone in my tent, watching mine beard grow." [What's wrong with thine English, Orik?]

"It doesn't rhyme, but then, you can't expect me to compose proper verse on the spur of the moment." [Yeah, who do you think I am, the great poet Paolini?]

Shameless thefts:

Lord of the Rings, of course: Elves are said to have come from across the silver sea. There is a line of Gollum dialogue.

Dune: I still think Elva is inspired by Alia. But the jig was up on Paolini cribbing from Herbert when he named a dragon "Bid'Daum." I'm not kidding; he really did that.

Monty Python: Seriously, the insults still sound like the French Taunter.

Predictable nonsense:

The red herrings were painful. [spoiler]Paolini names a place "the Vault of Souls," invents the concept of a dragon living on after death in its heart of hearts, suggests that these dragon hearts are what gives Galbatorix his power, and then denies that the Vault of Souls might contain dragon hearts to be tapped to combat the dark lord. It's glossed over, then denied outright, and then finally it of course turns out to be exactly what it seemed. It was also obvious, as soon as we found out that oaths can be broken if a true name changes, that Murtagh was going to escape Galbatorix's control by doing so. Even better: he did so through the power of looooove, like a Sailor Moon episode.[/spoiler]

Contradictions: Ugh. Brace yourselves.

During a cheeky "history" ramble at the beginning, Paolini retells the events of his previous three books and promptly makes several misleading explanations which suggest he hasn't read his own books.

Katrina's pregnant at the start of the book and was already showing in the previous book. The baby isn't born until well after a huge denouement, before which occurred the planning, attack, and defeat of the dark lord, followed by rebuilding and a few uprisings. Apparently all this happened in seven months.

A newborn baby "smiles" at Eragon. Sorry, dude. Babies that young can't smile. That was gas.

Healing a baby's face takes longer than [spoiler]killing Galbatorix[/spoiler]. Why.

Post-baby-face-healing, the elves praise Eragon and say that his amazing feat in doing so was far beyond anything any of their spellcasters could have achieved.

Eragon starts eating meat again, displaying no recognition that he decided earlier that eating meat was excusable only if other food sources were unavailable or if he thought it'd be too rude to refuse.

Paolini has stated in interviews as well as in his ancient language rules that the suffix "ya" makes stuff plural. He proceeds to break that rule about 140 times in this book.

Elva gets shamed and manipulated by Eragon in a horribly offensive way. She refuses to come on a mission. Someone dies. Eragon blames her, threatens her, makes her cry, forces her to apologize, and shames her into helping him next time. When confronting Galbatorix, he points out how weak it is to bring a child in, and he claims she came of her own free will.

[spoiler]Galbatorix tells Eragon he didn't become king by fighting fair. He then proceeds to relent and let Eragon have a fair fight (albeit with Murtagh). This "distraction" leads to a revelation that allows Eragon to mess with Galbatorix's head and he ends up destroying himself. Splendid.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]The Good Guys decide to change the way magic works to let dwarves and Urgals become Riders. They leave out the werecats, even though werecats showed up as one of the forces to be reckoned with as a race in this book.

Eragon can control reality at the end of the book because he knows the name of the ancient language. He then proceeds to act as though he is powerless to change some things about his life and others' lives that really suck: Some aspects of Elva's situation (he can't leave her with power but still take her pain?), crappy sexism that's pointed out to him, the loss of a sentimentally important artifact, and some prophecy about how he has to leave Alagaësia forever. Oh please.[/spoiler]

Nonsense/Contrived events: Lots of this too.

A special spear that was thought lost to the ages is recovered in the first chapter when someone tries to kill Saphira with it. It's a lance designed specifically to kill dragons. And then, despite having struck home on both Saphira and Thorn, it doesn't actually kill any dragons until [spoiler]they try to use it on Galbatorix's dragon. Then it works fine![/spoiler]

Roran creates a ruse that is so improbable that it was stupid. It depended on such dumb chance events that I couldn't swallow it. Especially when an enemy soldier who's suspicious of Roran is totally willing to just take a sip of his alcoholic beverage. Sounds totally like what military dudes would do before retreating!

Sometimes, using the ancient language makes something become true (like saying "fire" and suddenly there is fire). Other times, it's suggested you can't possibly say something in the ancient language unless it already is true, so it's a litmus test for lies. That doesn't make sense. Especially if you can bully someone into swearing loyalty to you which MAKES it true. Wouldn't a lie just BECOME true if you said it in the ancient language?

A cartoon villain scene occurs when Eragon and Arya are left chained up while a monster hatches from an egg. Once it hatches, it will eat them. Oh no! But of course, the culprits from a gore-obsessed religion don't stay to watch them get eaten alive. They stick around long enough to laugh at their plight, then leave the room. Which of course leads to them being able to escape in time. Why is the video game boss so surprised when they emerge alive? It knows it signed up to be a Bond villain.

When Eragon is directionless and doesn't know how to lead the Varden to victory, a prophecy is invoked, which leads him directly to a giant deus ex machina. He goes on the prophesied quest, finds exactly what he needs, and also finds out that [spoiler]deceased dragons have been watching over him since before he became a Rider. It was they who manipulated reality and his life to make everything improbable happen all along. Yes, Dragon Guardian Angels. Explains everything! Plus they find secret dragon eggs and therefore the dragons won't go extinct after all![/spoiler] Happy happy.

Eragon seems fine (though sad) over leaving Alagaësia to go train dragons in the east. When people keep asking him why he has to go and "never return," he invokes a prophecy Angela made. Angela also prophesied that he would have an epic romance. [spoiler]He didn't.
That said, even though he and Arya do not have sex (or even kiss), they exchange true names, which is much more intimate and suggests handing over ultimate control of each other. It's suggested strongly that they decide not to get together because of conflicting circumstances, not because of lack of feeling. Eragon clearly won the girl over by the end, even if it didn't pan out for him. (His dragon got laid, though! Saphira lost her virginity to Arya's dragon!)[/spoiler]

And finally, a few author fails:

Paolini's how-to on removing suspense from your novels: Eragon's cousin Roran and several other members of the Varden get crushed under a crumbling wall. Roran is the only one who survives because he happened to be underneath some kind of support thing when it fell. Paolini, you see, you're trying to inject your story with reasonable doubt about who might die, but you're doing it really poorly if a wall collapses and EVERYONE DIES EXCEPT THE IMPORTANT GUY. It doesn't fool us into thinking your main characters are actually in mortal danger.
A character like Roran could only die in self-sacrifice because there was no other way, or in a prophesied scenario, or, I don't know, saving a disabled child who's holding a puppy or something.

Paolini doesn't trust his audience. He thinks we're kinda thick. (And I guess we are, if we're still reading these books expecting to get some kind of pleasure out of the experience.) I've noticed it's very common for him to say something that we can completely understand, but then just in case we're extraordinarily thick, he'll have an ignorant character show up and ask questions so he can explain stuff to us that was usually pretty obvious.

Roran acts sexist, especially when he's doing so while pretending to give the finger to gender roles. And Chris still hasn't figured out the difference between writing a strong hero and writing an antisocial bastard.

Paolini's narration also suggests disabled people would be better off born dead, repeatedly compares people bending over to "like a cripple" or "like an old man with rheumatism," and advocates animal cruelty by having no one object to the werecats compelling regular cats to kill themselves in battle. There is too much torture--with details that involve the famous geological comparisons--and sometimes he includes so many details that it sounds like he's trying to prove he did the research this time.

And finally. . . .

Are you sure Eragon isn't you, Paolini?

Quote:
Wherever he looked, he saw an overwhelming amount of detail, but he was convinced there was even more that he was not perceptive enough to notice.

I found this sentence kind of ironic. Eragon's been told that he's not actually SEEING what he's looking at, and therefore he's trying to see more. However, very much like his author, Eragon doesn't understand that detail is NOT what you need in order to fully and properly understand something. I'd like Paolini to stop fixating on details and understand essence.”

swankivy wrote this review Wednesday, December 7, 2011. ( reply | view 6 replies | permalink )

• Rated 1 stars

“
Everyone's been asking me to review the third book in this series, so here I go. In case you didn't notice, it took me over a thousand days to force myself to tackle it, but I decided my Labor Day weekend needed to be ruined by something.

My review is pretty much a ramble about everything I disliked about this book, but I'll try to keep it relatively short.

The author still has basic storytelling problems. The main one I keep noticing is that he is trying to work description or exposition into the action more, but it still reads like he's stopping the "movie," ZOOMING IN ON EVERYTHING, and then pushing PLAY again when he's done. We nearly always get an extremely detailed description of every weapon, every person, every room, and every setting the characters encounter, and the adjectives used aren't connected to actions or attitudes. Or if it's exposition, maybe we'll have someone cast a spell, and then the action pauses while we endure two paragraphs of narration about other caveats to the spell that could have been applied but aren't useful here, and what might happen if it fails, and all kinds of trivia about other magics that are like this one--none of which end up being important in the scene. He's still failing to filter these observations through the minds of his characters, which dooms the narrative voice because it takes us OUT of the moment every single time.

He has also made some poor choices with apparently unintentionally sexist phrases and disturbing attitudes toward women, most notably by "telling" that Arya is brave and independent and capable but "showing" that she is not any of these things because she needs to be rescued AGAIN. There were so many other people Eragon could have had to rescue from imminent death, and yet again Paolini chose Arya as the damsel in distress. She holds her own and later saves his ass once too, but framing women like this suggests that the strong ones are the exception to the rule. And sometimes, Roran talks like a rapist. It's really uncomfortable:

Katrina: "My, you are bold, dear sir. Most bold indeed. I'm not sure I should be alone with you, for fear you might take liberties with me."

Roran:"Liberties, eh? Well, since you already consider me a scoundrel, I might as well enjoy some of these liberties."

Katrina:"You're a hard man to argue with, Roran Stronghammer."

So, take note, dudes. If a girl says she's worried being alone with you might lead to you pressuring her, you might as well actually do it since she thinks that way about you anyway. Such coquettish banter, this.

Add to that the fact that Saphira's narration is really obnoxious and recoil in horror at some of the untidy retcons Paolini tried to force into the story, and you have a very good reason to believe this fellow has not learned from experience.

Bad Narration: Stylistically, narration is pretty terrible in this book. The similes and metaphors are especially galling, and I noticed that a disturbing number of his comparisons involved geological themes. I mean everything was hard "as diamonds" or heavy "as lead" or bright "as gold." No one can just be "distinguished"; she's "the most distinguished, like an emerald resting on a bed of brown autumn leaves." Someone should tell Paolini we don't need everything compared to something else in order to understand it. Even a monster's blood, which happens to be blue-green, is described as "not unlike the verdigris that forms on aged copper." Coming across "Her tears appeared like rivers of silvered glass" just made me groan. And how about "Red as a ruby dipped in blood, red as iron hot to forge, red as a burning ember of hate and anger. . . ." So . . . was it red? As red as HATE and stuff? Don't forget to dip red things in other red things so you can go off on how red they are! And let's not forget "A flock of starlings darted across the afternoon sky, like fish through the ocean." 'Cause "a group of animals moved through their habitat, like another group of animals moving through their habitat" really helps us see it better? And the biggest problem with it is it's not just distracting and unnecessary; sometimes they place an alternate image in your mind and draw your attention AWAY from the object or situation he is describing.

The unnecessary description is especially pronounced when it comes to describing weapons. Paolini devotes an inordinate amount of time to his descriptions of swords and other tools. One of the shorter descriptions was as follows: "[A] bizarre implement: a single-edged weapon, two and a half feet long, with a full tang, scale grips, a vestigial crossguard, and a broad, flat blade that widened and was scalloped near the end, a shape reminiscent of a dragon wing." I found one sword description--for a sword the protagonist only used for a couple chapters--at a mind-blowing two hundred words, and don't even get me started on the chapter where Eragon actually makes a sword that matters. Twelve pages of excruciating detail explain how exactly he made the sword, and it reads like an instruction manual. (Because Paolini freely admits he was fascinated with a certain Japanese swordmaking book at the time. Gee, you can't tell.) It's like if you just wanted to watch a crime thriller and twenty minutes of the footage involved an autopsy detailing exactly how the victim died. Some of the descriptions actually truly do not make sense, such as the description of Arya's voice as "Her low, rich voice contained hints of rustling pine needles and gurgling brooks and music played on reed pipes." Can you imagine that? Someone's VOICE having all those things in it? Considering the gurgling, I think Arya may need a doctor.

And let's not forget our old friend the unnecessary speech tags.

"But how could you prove that?" objected Eragon.

::sigh::

I shouldn't have to say it again, but if the WORDS THEMSELVES are an apology, an agreement, or an objection, you DO NOT NEED TO IDENTIFY THEM AS SUCH with your speech tags? ARE YOU ALLERGIC TO THE WORD "SAID," MY DEAR BOY?

("Yes, yes he is," said the exasperated author of this essay.)

And my favorite, of course, was when I encountered a single sentence that was 307 words long. Also known as "this is where the editor fell asleep." The narration described all the dwarves who were sitting around a table, and the sentence contained 9 semicolons, 28 commas, and 26 descriptive adjectives. When the final dwarf was described as "she of the nut-brown skin marred only by a thin, crescent-shaped scar high upon her left cheekbone, she of the satin-bright hair bound underneath a silver helm wrought in the shape of a snarling wolf's head, she of the vermilion dress and the necklace of flashing emeralds set in squares of gold carved with lines of arcane runes" . . . I really thought I was going to shoot myself.

Bad Dialogue: Two big problems. One: everyone--no matter their education--talks as though they are royalty, and it is uncomfortably unnatural. Roran, the illiterate farm boy, says "You dote upon her words as if each one were a diamond, and your gaze lingers upon her as if you were starving and she a grand feast arrayed an inch beyond your reach." You'd never guess his job is beating people to death with a hammer. Two: Other people's reaction is to praise their verbal abilities. This happens like six different times in the book, and I am convinced it is an attempted Jedi mind trick on Paolini's part. A character says something awkwardly phrased, long-winded, and overly ornate, and another character tells him how poetic he is or expresses amazement and surprise at his eloquence. Is he just trying to convince us that's so? (The "cursing," which happens a couple times when characters who are very angry spew out a stream of obscenities, is especially inappropriate. They all sound like they've been taking insult lessons from the French Taunter.)

And I probably don't have to say why a fantasy novel that actually contains the phrase "Die, puny human!" should be punished and reminded to go on the paper.

Predictable Plot Elements: This book is riddled with "revelations" that are written as if they will be a surprise to the reader, but I feel almost insulted when the narration suggests I didn't know. Take for instance monsters that are left for dead and actually aren't--wow, never saw that coming! Or a girl being revealed as being pregnant after her "secret" was already referred to multiple times, including her acting weird whenever having children is mentioned. How about when a character mysteriously referring to his "hearts" instead of his "heart" turns out to--oh my gosh--actually be foreshadowing? Yeah. It's really insulting.

Nonsensical, Contrived, or Contradictory Plot Elements: The most obvious and most drastically awful problem with this book is that the magic system continues to be incoherent and continues to get worse. People cast spells that go against the rules of spellcasting, or in a couple cases contradict everything Paolini has said. (Especially one scene where Eragon saves himself from an attack without using conscious thought or magic words; he has no time to compose a spell either mentally or verbally, and so he just "rewove the fabric of the world into a pattern more pleasing to him." This is established as NOT how magic works.) He also gets a ridiculous magic sword that bursts into flames for no reason every time he says the magic word for "fire," and seems shocked that fire was produced even though he didn't try to cast a spell. Guess what? Saying "fire" in the Ancient Language WHILE THINKING IT WAS A CURSE WORD and NOT KNOWING HE EVEN HAD MAGIC was how Eragon accidentally cast his first spell in the first book. Why is it so unbelievable now? Eragon also randomly guesses--on the first try--another character's true name, by which he can control him with magic. This wasn't a person he knew really well (Arya suggests Eragon doesn't even know her well enough to guess her true name, but he figured out the true name of his cousin's fiancée's dad), and there's no precedent for this random true name discovering in the book, before or since. In fact, when Eragon's worried that Galbatorix might guess HIS true name, Arya completely dismisses it as impossible. Huh?

Eragon denies Roran's request to be made more powerful through magic because he would "lose whatever strength or speed" that Roran would gain from it. This isn't how magic works in his story either. When he cursed Elva to grow up too fast, he didn't literally lose years. When he heals people he doesn't lose his own health. Admit it, Eragon. You just want an excuse to be the most badass in the story. It seems like Paolini's magic system only makes sense in weird little pockets of logic that wouldn't actually add up to a comprehensive set of physical laws. And you know why he does this? Because he constructs his physical laws around what he wants to happen instead of having things happen that reflect the physical laws.

There is also a consistent, disturbing trend for Eragon and Saphira to threaten people, barely suppress their own violent intent, and behave like tyrants. Saphira snorts fire at someone who said she couldn't have mead (after which he changes his mind right quick, and it's written as funny), and she attacks a tree spirit when it doesn't answer her fast enough. Even worse, Eragon tortures a blind man and banishes him (then gets emo about what HE went through having to do that), ignores a man's mortally ill wife to go drinking with his buddies until he's reminded again to heal her, and seriously considers taking the dwarf council hostage if they don't vote how he wants them to. It's horrible, and yet the narration treats Eragon as though he is a gleaming hero.

A hole: Paolini writes in English. The language of the humans is never named, but we just understand that it's the common language. Its not having its own name doesn't fit in with anything established in the story, and he keeps calling it "Eragon's own tongue." C'mon Paolini. Name it. You name everything else, including swords, and you name your main characters three or four times depending on who's talking to them. I bet you named your buttcheeks. You can name the language.

Arya tracks Eragon down at one point, and when he asks how she found him, she explains that "A Rider does not walk unnoticed in this world, Eragon. Those who have the ears to hear and the eyes to see can interpret the signs easily enough." She goes on for a while and it's clear he basically leaves a track in the air. I hereby dub this the Scent of Rider Farts. Which is going to bite Paolini in the ass really hard, if pretty much anyone can track him due to his being unable to walk unnoticed in the world. Perhaps his Protagonist Powers will counter this tremendous disadvantage?

I also have a problem with the magically enhanced soldiers the evil king sends at Eragon and his allies. They've been modified to not feel pain. This somehow makes them harder to kill, which makes no sense. They only die when they're hacked apart or beheaded, like zombies, but if the only reason they keep advancing when they're mortally wounded is that they don't feel or fear pain, it seems ridiculous that mortal injuries don't still make them go into shock or bleed to death. Painless soldiers actually shouldn't be harder to kill.

The aforementioned retcons mostly involved changing Eragon's known father from Morzan to Brom. In order to make Brom fit as his father, an entire chapter devoted to unpacking misconceptions and exposing lies he'd been told had to be inserted, wrapped up by a conveniently "recorded" memory Saphira had kept for Eragon in which Brom confessed to being his father. There were so many holes that had to be plugged and so many queries that ended in "Well Brom never told anyone why he did this or that" that I felt very strongly that this was an attempted twist that fell as flat as M. Night Shyamalan's movies starting with Signs. I imagine Paolini just got tired of being told he was writing Star Wars in Middle-Earth and decided to undo Luke Skywalker being Darth Vader's son.

And as a good thing about the book, I chuckled when Eragon asked if there was anything he could do to appease the dwarf clan that hates him and Orik replied, "You could die." Yes, you could, Eragon. Why don't you get on that?

I must say this was a terribly difficult book for me to read and I honestly do not think Christopher Paolini is improving as a writer. There were perhaps three places in the book that I was interested in what was going to happen, and there were MANY places where I honestly would have just put the book down and not thought of it again if I weren't trying to review it critically. It's frustrating, because Paolini has determination and imagination, but his incredibly debilitating flaws are his inability to write character and his absolutely tone-deaf prose (especially since he decorates it after the fact with gaudy adjectives resembling fake versions of the gemstones he's always shoving into his similes). If he would learn to write people as if they were something other than plot devices and learn to stop writing narration as if he is an overenthusiastic performer, he might improve. Until he does so--until he realizes he ought to--he will continue to be a lucky kid who grew up to be a below average writer . . . an artist whose art is only admired by those who don't know better.”

swankivy wrote this review Thursday, September 8, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“I have mixed feelings about this book. What I liked: the world desperately needs more books for and about trans teenagers, especially trans men since their struggles are not as well-known and are often hidden behind incorrect beliefs about feminism, lesbianism, and tomboyism. I liked that some of what the title character, J, went through was very authentic--especially with regards to romantic relationships. (Many trans people have a very hard time imagining themselves in romantic or sexual relationships because their bodies are the wrong sex, forcing them to be "the girlfriend" or "the boyfriend" when they don't think of themselves that way.) I liked that J had unrealistic expectations about how easy it would be to transition, and that he was kind of stupid and ill-informed in some ways but was driven by so much passion for the life he knew he needed to have. I liked that the parents didn't understand--that they saw it more as "she wants to be a boy" rather than "he has always been a boy and wants a body to match." I thought it was interesting that J's best friend Melissa tried to portray his transsexuality as "emerging from a cocoon" in a dance and he had to explain (with some frustration) that she wasn't accurately capturing his experience if she thought of it as changing from one thing to another. And I appreciated that J wasn't always consistent, sometimes had doubts, and couldn't see his own specialness sometimes. What I didn't like: J's voice felt a little hollow sometimes in my opinion--there was a sort of disconnect, like Beam was saying all the right things but I wasn't convinced that there was a real person in there feeling them. It sometimes read more like an essay, just a tumble of "stuff trans guy is feeling," than organically felt experiences. Sometimes the concept of someone feeling this way was enough to bring out the emotion, but sometimes it wasn't because I didn't see it really coming from him. I also thought the writing in the first half was incredibly awkward at times, especially when a description of J's physical features was wedged in--a lengthy one, too--and a bunch of patchy flashbacks attempted to make J's past coalesce for us. Readers shouldn't notice that they're being fed exposition, and I kept noticing.”

swankivy wrote this review Thursday, April 28, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Hats off to Mr. Deutsch for the originality here. You just don't see too many stories about Orthodox Jewish kids, not to even mention ones who fight trolls. I didn't relate very much to Mirka because her drive to fight monsters seemed, I don't know, without real motive? She wants to kill bad things because, well, they're bad things! But since kids are silly like that sometimes and just want to go off and be heroes without thinking it through (like Mirka does), I could overlook the fact that I didn't connect to her desire to fight things that never did anything to her. The seamless integration of Mirka's Jewish life was refreshing, and I liked how her traditions were an integral part of her take on the world. ”

swankivy wrote this review Thursday, April 28, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“I enjoyed this book, but the first half was dull compared to the second half. I felt like Duane spent too much time making inside jokes, displaying "cute" aspects of wizardry (I don't think I can forgive her for "WizPod," still), and name-dropping about a bajillion previous characters so we wouldn't forget about them before they became completely unimportant to the plot. I did like where it led, though--to the terrifying transformation of Nita's partner Kit into a tool of his previous Martian incarnation, and I liked how Nita didn't lose her cool when she was scared and had to rescue Kit. Despite being about aliens, I saw a disappointing side of "human" nature reflected in the two transplanted Martian cultures refusing to give up their desire to fight each other--it was what they lived for and what they died for. Nita and Kit finally acknowledging some of their attraction was nice, though I would have been just as happy to see a special partnership that was close and nearly sacred WITHOUT being romance. And I thought it was odd that Duane spent so much time focusing on stuff Dairine was doing without actually mixing it into the plot's finale. She usually finds a way to do that, and instead all we've gotten was a side trip to build up what will probably pay off in the next book. I was also a bit uncomfortable as I read about Kit's older sister Helena . . . I don't remember her from previous books, and felt like she was grafted into the family along with a history that I don't remember being mentioned before.”

swankivy wrote this review Thursday, April 28, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Very good book about a high school student who was a promising track athlete until she lost her leg in an accident. Jessica thinks her life is over, but help from family and friends (new and old) plus actually learning to run again with a racing prosthesis helps her turn her finish line into a new start. The beginning was emotional and well rendered, managing to show how much running meant to Jessica by describing what it felt like to have it taken away. The chapters were short and staccato especially toward the beginning, which helped emphasize the abrupt ups and downs of her experiences. And the narration almost always did a good job of introducing people and situations without feeling like they were deliberately expository. Interestingly, the story is written in present tense and it took me a while to notice; it was just that natural. And I liked that the book was divided into sections that drew their titles from running metaphors, taking Jessica's life in micro and generalizing it to the big picture. The only bits that felt a little fake for me were Jessica's relationship with a guy she'd had a crush on for a long time (who of course ends up actually liking her) and some of the saccharine lessons Jessica learned through befriending a girl with cerebral palsy and learning to see beyond her condition. I thought the best thing about the book was how realistically it depicted a teenage girl dealing with guilt, shame, depression, and inspiration, and how sometimes she had to re-learn things she'd already learned. I also like that not every kinda crappy, petty character in the book was magically rehabilitated at the end (because that often happens in these kinds of books, yet a couple catty girls didn't seem to learn anything), and I liked that Jessica's friends sometimes said and did the wrong things or didn't know how to feel or were selfish and imperfect, just like Jessica herself. ”

swankivy wrote this review Tuesday, March 1, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Two ordinary parents write their candid reactions to their daughter's journey through cancer. Specifically, an incurable, rare form of brain cancer called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). Their elder daughter, Elena, was diagnosed with this disease, leaving them to grapple with the implications. They started a journal of their experiences for their younger daughter, Grace, hoping they could preserve some of Elena for her sister as well as document what they felt, but since they shared this on the Internet, it got a lot of attention. What's incredibly special is that since Elena's tumor affected her ability to speak, she turned to writing love notes for her family in order to communicate, and after they finally lost the battle with cancer, for months afterwards they were still finding these sweet notes that Elena hid all over the house for them to find after she couldn't be there anymore to say she loved them. The whole story and the parents' honest commentary was very touching, and the book itself was technically well-written but a bit difficult to read sometimes due to occasional lack of context. (Some of the scenes are very well orchestrated because Brooke and Keith Desserich took us into the experience, but then there'd be a skip and we'd have no idea what happened in between. Sometimes a personal journal is difficult to follow because of stuff like that.) The photographs interspersed throughout of Elena, the family, and Elena's love notes were heartwarming, and the parents did a very good job of exploring the hauntedness, terror, anger, and unconditional love that rises to the surface in situations like this. Their "seize the day" message is unfortunately not one that most people would be able to take to heart unless something like this happened to them, so I hope it's helped more parents hug their kids and more people pursue life to the fullest while they've got it.”

swankivy wrote this review Wednesday, December 29, 2010. ( reply | permalink )