Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Eragon (pronounced EHR-uh-gahn) is your average dragon/fantasy tale which follows after the J.R.R. Tolkien legacy. I have avoided this book because of the huge negative press around the relationship between this novel and the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars series. People have claimed the book is cliched and derivative.

And I have to say, it's all true.

But in saying that this is all true, you diminish Star Wars to being a copy of Lord of the Rings and you diminish Lord of the Rings to being a copy of Homer's work and then you keep going from there. So, yes, there are some similarities but those similarities are used in a much better way than most of the DragonLance series and I hear very few people complaining about those. It's because they are fantasy pulp, so get over it.

The one thing I am bothered by was all the hype around the author. Purportedly, this novel was written by a 17 year old boy. I don't believe that. I believe that the person who came up with the story, the characters and the plot was a 17 year old kid, I'd even go as far as claiming that some punk kid wrote a whole mess of words which became this book, but he did not write this book. The editor wrote a good chunk of this book. Read it and see why: no 17 year old would have enough dedication (or knowledge) of how to find out details put into this book.

But, it was entertaining for what it was. Sure there are parallels between this book and others. Aren't there always? Rebecca and I sat down and decided the only two things which are originally Star Wars is the concept of the Force (which both of us are hesitant to really claim as being uniquely Star Wars because this concept exists in many fantasy genre tales, in one form or another), but ultimately the "main bad guy turning out to be your father" is the only plot device Star Wars brought to the world. So live with it.