I finally finished this book. It was very tough to read. If I wasn't already invested in the story and the characters from the previous 3 books, I would never have finished.
Most authors I've read seem to grow in their writing ability and style as they go on.
Paolini doesn't appear to have grown at all. I'm not sure if being so successful at such a young age went to his head or if he never went on to get a formal education in writing techniques or what.
His dialogue is just painful in places. I'm not sure if he's trying to dumb things down to a younger reader level or if he just can't write proper dialogue between adults. The book touches on very adult problems of love and loss. Of war and redemption, but the dialogue feels childish in most places.
I wouldn't recommend this book unless like me you want to see how it ends after already reading the previous books. I also wouldn't recommend this series as a whole to a new reader. There is a lot of better fantasy series out there that you should read instead.
Overall the series could have been much shorter. He goes off on tangents at several points in the 3rd and 4th books that don't seem to move the plot forward. This is often an issue with many fantasy books however.
I find it particularly frustrating here because despite all this extra pointless detail, he seems to leave a lot of things unanswered. I hope he doesn't plan to add a 5th book to the series, and that he simply wanted to leave some things to the reader's imagination. I feel like he could have explained a few things better while still accomplishing that however.
Read on if you want some more specific examples of problems with some light spoilers.
1. Roran is sent off to win some battle in place of another commander for a city that seems to have real point to the plot apart from growing Roran's reputation and to allow for him to be promoted to a Commander in the army.2. There is an over abundance of Dues Ex Machina. In particular Angela showing up and solving huge problems at critical moments. Angela's character is never sufficiently explained as to who she is or how she is able to do what she does. She mostly seems to be a plot device Paolini to write himself out of the corners he puts himself in. Another example is some mystery woman who shows up at a critical moment to save Roran from certain death who presence/background is never touched on.3. The complaint of Paolini's copying from popular works (LotR, Star Wars) is not a new one. I'd forgiven some/most of it as simply popular themes in fiction/fantasy (ie the poor young being thrust into a grand adventure with the mysterious mentor). But his ending is almost identical to the end of LotR. The battle against the great evil won, the heroes move on.
