Ugh. Okay. I am a pretty generous reader. While I’m reading, I can’t help but take notice of what doesn’t work, but afterwards I prefer to remember what I think the author has done well. There are obvious ‘pros’ in Brisingr, the third book in Christopher Paolini’s breakaway bestseller fantasy series: well-planned broad-scale writing, it’s fairly well-paced, one or two emphatic and wonderful characters. But there were a lot of ‘cons’ that sent smoke curling out my nostrils.

ONE: Paolini cannot write dialogue. Overexplanation, overcharacterisation, telling-not-showing, clunky dialect-rendering (when people say ‘aye’ every so often, they’re rural! or at least friendly!), it’s all there. I can’t tell you how many times I came across unnecessary words, sentences and exchanges that could and should have been sheared off. Bad dialogue turns characters from actors to bores, and I often had to suppress suspicions that some of the main people were really not very bright.

TWO: If you like things to be expressed elegantly (an adverb to be scorned by book critics, I know) or at least to be emotionally affecting, you won’t often find that in this book. The overwhelming impression is that of a second draft at best, with fan fiction-esque exclamation marks (…he wanted revenge!) and unanchored adventure-wish fulfilment moments (I’m enjoying fighting sooooo much, without qualification, even though I just had a massive ethical quandary about it) all too common.

THREE: The protagonist, Eragon — not my favourite-ever hero. Way too few redeeming points, and it usually takes a long and boring time for him to figure his thoughts out. (Plus, he’s not prone to very exciting thoughts.) Eragon was charming enough when he was a boy fiddling around with a dragon egg, but it’s close to crunch time in the series, and he still hasn’t got many defining characteristics. A bit whiny, actually. Lots of the other characters are way more compelling.

So, my open letter to Christopher Paolini: I know you take your work seriously, and you’ve done an okay job so far. But you make too much money from these books for me not to want to tell you this: curb your fan-fic tendencies, make Eragon more interesting and decisive, and the dialogue shorter and more pithy, or there will be blood.