E = Eragon by Christopher Paolini

"All his work of the past three days had led to this moment. He took a last steadying breath and -- an explosion shattered the night." Eragon by Christopher Paolini 

Eragon, a poor farm boy from Carvahall, finds a beautiful blue gem while out hunting in the mountains near his home. His intention is to sell it at market, but the gem hatches, revealing a baby dragon. Literally overnight, his life is changed forever as he becomes one of the mythical Dragon Riders.

This is a young adult novel, written by a young adult, and as such reads like a young adult novel, and the reader shouldn't expect it to read any other way. And because I read it when I was roughly the same age as CP when he started writing it, it wound up holding a special place in my heart. My original rating of it, was as a five star novel, but this time around I dropped it down to a four.

It's real reason for dropping down to a four star rating though is CP's overuse of over used fantasy character stereotypes. We once again have and orphaned hero traveling with his mentor. There's a distressing damsel and an evil overlord whose minions are causing havoc across the countryside. The saving grace is that the hero of the story isn't looking to fight a war for the good of the people, he's actually on a quest for vengeance...which for such a young character is a delightfully dark motive.

Things I liked about the story included that the characters motives are clearly flushed out, and the terrain is richly described. The author made it easy to transport the reader to another world. I also liked that the author had a go at creating languages for the different races of mythical peoples to be speaking. New language is a lofty goal, sometimes fantasy novels just can't be bothered with worrying about what language a vastly different culture is likely to speak.

This is the only dragon book I've ever read, so I don't have anything else to compare Saphira to... I think some physical attributes are deeply believable, like dorsal spikes and armored scales. I have trouble believing they'd come in all colors of the rainbow, but I like how they're portrayed as a people instead of as animals. And I recognize how silly it is for me to examine the believability of a fantastical creature that doesn't exist, but the point of fantasy is the suspension of disbelief and Christopher Paolini, inexperienced he may have been, took a pretty good shot at making me suspend disbelief.

I'd definitely recommend this book to younger readers, and those readers out there who are still young at heart.