Eldest

After a second read-through, Eldest felt like a better book than Eragon - this was not how I'd remembered it. It seemed to me that Paolini's writing had become sharper. The introduction of Roran's viewpoint helped somewhat, though it would have been better if the two characters had been a little different, the fact that they're (foster) brothers notwithstanding. They're basically twins as far as character is concerned.

Hate the Writing Style

Second person stories are weird, and not my cup of tea. I don't like reading about “myself” doing or saying or feeling things I would not. In this case, I was able to look past it since the reader is addressed by a specific name with a specific history and therefore it's more like playing a first person video game with a pre-made character. However, this book did not succeed in creating a connection between the main character and the reader - at least not for me.

This is the story about a woman who spends the majority of her life wallowing in grief after her mother dies in front of her - grief so intense that even as an adult she still has a PTSD reaction to going across a bridge in a car and whines about not having her mom, who was never even a good mother in the first place, to tell her how to be a mom to her newborn. She has an amazing support system, but pushes them all away in a petulant insistence to wallow in self-pity. She also may have untreated, intense mental illness, considering she thinks her baby is born premature as punishment for not telling her husband the real way her mom died. Yikes!

The prose felt juvenile and I hated the lack of quotation marks even though plenty of dialogue existed in it. I felt like I was reading a first draft of a vague idea which desperately needed to be fleshed out and fact checked. For example: I doubt a baby with toes the size of rice would be allowed outside an incubator and a blood-soaked towel locked in a car for four days would almost certainly be far too rancid to both keep and use to wipe someone's face.

Overall, I struggled to keep reading and got zero payoff because the story just never seemed to go anywhere.