Get ready for a bloody review, which may include spoilers. So beware!

A friend of mine told me to read the book because he said it was good. I decided to do this before seeing the movie, which had been out on dvd for some time already. The book was cheap and on sale in the book store.

The book....was very slow paced. If you could not get through Lord of the Rings, then Eragon might not be the book for you. Although, one good thing it had was short chapters, between 2 to 10 pages at the most. If they had been Lord of the Rings sized chapters, it would have made it much harder to read. It is a "teen" book, but there are some graphic images in there that are actually kinda disturbing. For example (spoiler!) when Eragon and Brom went to Yazuac, there was a pile of bodies, killed by the Urgal, and on top was the body of a baby (there is more to this, but you get the idea).

Personally, when I was a teen (which was not that long ago) I don't ever remember reading anything like this at all! It is true that the writing level is teen for this book, but the graphic images are anything but. There were also some sexual references that surprised me when I read it.

Overall, I liked the book, but definitely not enough to read it again. I do plan on reading the second, but not at the moment. The character development was slow, and it took me awhile to get a sense of each character's personality. I really liked the idea of it and the history behind the characters is explained in full and was kept simple, which is really important for me. I easily forget who is related to who when there is a complex history involved.

Now onto the movie…………….and it sucked in comparison to the book. If I had not read the book, then I would have liked the movie. They took the story and butchered it, rearranged it, and sped it up a ton. I understand that there was a lot they had to cut out to make it into an hour and a half movie, but I don’t think they needed to alter the story so much! It was almost painful watching that movie.

They had a great story to use, but they messed it up terribly. Now they will have to mess the 2nd book around to get it to match the storyline of the movie, if there is a second movie. I wonder if they read ahead and saw if the characters they cut out from the first one appear in the second with greater importance, because they may have screwed themselves there. I can think of 4 characters so far, one in particular that they should have included, because all of their parts were bigger than Arya’s. It’s funny that they would make her an important character because she is the “love” interest.

So if you read the book, do not watch the movie and vice versa.