kinesixtape's reviews
337 reviews

I read this book when I was in middle school, many and many a moon ago. This book had everything my eleven-year-old heart called for: adventure, traveling, beautiful princesses, dragons. Everyone else had read LOTR (we were an ambitious middle school) but I just couldn't get into the fancy prose and narration - Paolini's Eragon was so much more easy to read and enjoyable because of it. The next year, the second book came out - and I snapped that up voraciously. But by the time the third book was announced, I had forgotten everything that had happened in both books (an amazing feat for someone who could recall events in books I'd read in first grade even in high school).

And re-reading Eragon, I can totally see why. This is not a memorable addition to the fantasy genre - it is neither very bad nor very good. The things that happen are things I have read (and myself written when I was around Paolini's age) numerous times before. He does nothing to buck the tropes of the fantasy genre. There's a beautiful elven princess that Eragon lusts after but doesn't deserve: she's everything a mortal woman cannot be (super-powerful, super-beautiful, super-graceful and all-around perfect) and yet will clearly fall in love with him as this series continues. The entire Varden rallies around Eragon without really knowing who he is and where he comes from. Paolini sets certain characters up to be "bad guys" - Murtagh is clearly one, The Twins another - and while their evil intentions aren't revealed in Eragon I can just see it coming from a mile away. The author is a clear fan of "tell, don't show." Is this character the love interest? Better make her a beautiful princess with magical powers and sword-fighting abilities better than everyone else's and not a single physical or emotional flaw in her. Is this character a bad guy? Better spend all our time telling the readers about how Eragon's flesh crawls just looking at them or how Eragon and Saphira don't know what to believe.

Eragon is by far the worst part of it. He just simply lacks a backbone. The whole book, he is acted upon: by Saphira's egg, by Brom's tutelage, by Angela and Solenbaum's prophesy and general weirdness, by Arya as she lays dormant, etc, etc. Even his great big battle at the end is brought about because the Shade, Durza, goes looking for him (and I think the Twins lured him to that spot alone, but that is neither confirmed nor denied at the end of this book). That entire fight scene, Eragon is reacting - or not reacting, in the case of his new-found scar. Yet even as Eragon is passively shuffled from point to point, he spends a lot of time whining and wondering about how much power he can exert. Listen. If I had a megalithic dragon perched under my bony little butt, I definitely would be making hardcore decisions from the gate - especially when those decisions are vital to my survival. But Eragon can't handle whether or not he'll become a part of the Varden until he's, oh, twenty pages away from stumbling into their mountain. He'll dither about the slave trade and how Galbatorix treats the Common Man, but decide to actively take up arms against him? Psht. Clearly too much effort. Even the dragon was rolling her eyes and snorting over Eragon's complete inability to decide what he was going to do.

Angela is definitely one of my favorite characters. I know she's a woman, but I feel like she would wear a curly, Salvidor Dali-type mustache if she could grow one. Who else would wear funky-looking armor and tell fortunes with dragon bone runes? Likewise, Saphira the dragon has quite a bit of sass in her pants, when she's allowed to show it. Jeod also peeked my interest. Life spent secretly shipping supplies on the open seas to your kingdom's arch-enemy must be deathly exciting. Besides which, what about his friendship with Brom? Will his wife ever be satisfied or is she going to divorce his butt? Why is it that most of the side characters are more interesting than the protagonist and his love interest?

Reading this book is like putting on a cozy pair of slippers. Your mind is nowhere near to being blown. Nothing has changed: the women are stereotypically "strong girls" (meaning they have to be distant and cool and need to faint at least once before the series is done and/or be saved by a man); the main protagonist has made no real mistakes that have led to deep soul-searching and final triumph on the side of good; the main protagonist's daddy is probably the evil king Galbatorix AND HOW DO YOU FIGHT YOUR OWN FATHER? People love these kinds of books because they are comfortable - you know what's going to happen, even when it's a whole new setting with a whole new cast. For me, though, I want to see a book where the girl gets a dragon (and kicks butt, no fainting allowed), or the main protagonist initially falls for the comforts of serving the bad guy before having an attack of his/her guilty conscience, or SOMETHING. Just...something NEW. However, if you like the fantasy genre and like the general tropes and want to see a whole new way of having them, you'll really love this book.

PS. I do plan on continuing through this series because I hope it picks up with Brisingr but thus far, I want to know what eleven-year-old me was thinking.

I should preface this review by saying: I *love* long books. My two favorite books - The Crimson Petal and The White and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell - both have more than a thousand pages each. And I adored Margaret George's Autobiography of Henry VIII. History is a special pet subject for me, and in middle school I read everything I could about Ancient Egypt I could lay my hands on.

So why only two stars? This book had so much promise to be everything I adored. Yet, I still found it supremely lacking. For a Queen who defied her time's expectations, managing to resuscitate a failing empire so well that it could take on the might of Rome and barely financially feel the hit - for a woman who managed to have children with two of the most powerful men in Rome - why was Cleopatra so...just...boring?

Her narrative was painfully repetitive. Every time she saw Alexandria, she compared it to a jewel; Julius Caesar was slow in bed, as capable in the sheets as he was in the battlefield (but who was he leaving her behind to go sleep with next? A man?); and all the encounters with Antony made her wish she could escape her skin and have their souls entwine! It was as if Margaret George had wanted to drive certain points home about the way that Cleopatra related to these people and surroundings - but that, unlike people like myself, these feelings overall never changed. I have had boyfriends I would've told you three years ago I planned to marry that I can't stand now. Friends that were my "besties" for decades until there was betrayal on a side that created a frosty overtone that precludes us from being anything more than nodding acquaintances now. Cleopatra's relationships with people barely changed at all once she got to know them: Caesar, the perfect, elusive husband; Antony, the rollicking captain of a band of pirates (I mean Roman soldiers, oops); Octavian, the frosty blonde with a crush on Cleo herself. Instead of having these characters' interactions markedly change Cleo Philopater, George seemed hardly willing to find new ways to express the same impressions we'd already had.

And Cleo's narration was as dry as the sand covering the Sphynx! Pretending for a moment that this pharaoh on the run had time to sit down and speak with her scribes for what I would consider to be YEARS on end, instead of what George describes as a few short months while waiting for Octavian to roll into Alexandria - why would she take care to describe every detail of every gown, every single nuance of the landscape? Unless it's the daily travel journal of a scholar who has nothing else to do with his time, it's completely unlikely that so much detail could be lavished on simple affairs. I feel as if cutting some of the narration would have made this book more interesting - there's only so much about banquets and awkward love-making I can read and retain before I'm bored stiff. By about four hundred pages, I was counting the single-digit percentages I was finishing up. By the end, I couldn't take Antony's death scene and was praying for it to be over soon. (Spoiler alert: it wasn't.) Olympos' ending was honestly better than the rest of the book put together - his wit and reverence for the Queen brought a little breath back into this mummy of a novel.

The Memoirs of Cleopatra was honestly just okay. Cleopatra Philopater did not come to life for me; she was just as static as the paintings on the inside of a pyramid. I wasn't stirred by any of the major moments of the plot nor did I particularly care that almost all of the main characters were dead. For those looking for charm and wit in equal measure, I suggest Margaret George's Autobiography of King Henry VIII - and am hoping other of her books will match that tome's tone and not this one's.

Three Stars: It was good.

The first book was a good read for me - quick, easy, interesting - the kind of book I finished in three hours' time. Magic in this world was so quirky and inventive, it kept me engrossed; and the idea of having to literally travel through the four chambers of the heart to save someone was (in my opinion) pretty well done. I even started the book by absolutely hating Miss Priss (aka Ceony Twill) but found myself liking her and rooting for her in the end. Was my world view changed? No. Did I particularly fall in love with the characters? No. But did I enjoy myself, like at so many of the blockbuster movies at the drive-in? Heck yeah! So it was with eagerness that I found myself anticipating the second installation.

A lot of people had a lot of complaints in this book: the casual sexism (not skirts above the knee; heaven forbid, what kind of loose girl do you think Ceony is?);

the fact that Emery returns Ceony's affection, even though there should be a professional boundary there;

the excessive blushing; the obsessive romance; and the weird un-world building Ms Holmberg has going for her. There isn't anything in this list I can disagree with. Ms Holmberg's writing style is as smooth as flan, but it can get just as sticky as one.

The historical inaccuracies would be acceptable if more than just a slight blush of the world was fleshed out in these pages. Is it because magic makes things cheaper that Ceony can use a gun and not have to worry about the price of bullets, let alone the gun? How does this world already have high-level plastics when the first synthetic polymer, made of phenol and formaldehyde, was only created in 1907? (I mean, when did they figure out that plastic was, in fact, a material? The 1700s?) These are things that require only a couple of sentences' worth of explanation and would make this world breathe for us beyond what Ceony and Emery have experienced with only paper.

The romance with Ceony and Emery just...creeps me out. I've never had a crush on a teacher. As soon as they stood at the head of the class, anything I may have thought about their looks ceased to exist. I know that I'm an anomaly - that almost everyone has had a crush on their teacher - but except for the legal cases that make the news, teacher/student pairings while the student has yet to graduate are simply no-go and student/teacher pairings after graduation are incredibly rare. Teachers know and understand that a professional boundary has to exist there, even if students do not. Wouldn't it make this book more poignant, more touching, if Ceony's crush wasn't returned? That's a real-life problem lots of students face (although it isn't as big a deal as having pigs' blood dumped on your head at prom), and it could be interesting to see that sort of heart-wrenching issue be dealt with in a steam-punk-esque world rife with magic.

Besides that creepier aspect to it, the romance itself is simply immature.

Screaming in a public area, "KISS ME BEFORE YOU GET YOURSELF KILLED!" is the sort of thing that strikes me as melodramatic for no purpose.

Noting that you're blushing (but isn't it great that Emery never actually sees?) whenever you think his name is something I expect from a twelve-year-old. In the last book, I thought we'd said Ceony had never had a boyfriend; in this one, she had one in secondary school - the time for that kind of behavior was then, not now. What happened to the kick-butt Ceony who was a complete and utter Ice Princess in Book 1? Wouldn't she have better control over all this goofiness?

Delilah was another one of those, "Oh yeah! Forgot to tell ya..." moments that left me puzzled.

When she died, I really could have cared less.

She was nothing more than a prop. All I knew was that she was a Gaffer (glass magician), she had blonde ringlets, she came from France, and she was apprenticed to Professor McGonagall Mg Aviosky. I probably could have connected to a friendly outdoor squirrel more easily than Delilah, because it would've had more personality than this cardboard cut-out friend.

The ending left me speechless. In a bad way.

I consider this a deus ex machina - or an idiot ex machina, whatever floats your boat. Ceony didn't ever want to be a Folder. She wanted to be a Smelter (metal magician). Suddenly, at the end of Book 2, the bad guy babbles all of his plans to become an Excisioner (blood magician) and shows her how she can stop being bonded to her material and change to any material she wishes instead. Ceony has done no work to figure this out. She has not shown that she is so gifted at this magic that she can come up with whole new examples of application for it (except for [b: The Paper Magician|20727654|The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Trilogy, #1)|Charlie N. Holmberg|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1405618531s/20727654.jpg|40051132], where she uses the blood on the paper to freeze Lira; she doesn't continue trying to see what other liquids can do for the magic, so I count that as a mistake). Yet, much like Bella in [b: Twilight|41865|Twilight (Twilight, #1)|Stephenie Meyer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1361039443s/41865.jpg|3212258], she's been given this incredible power to basically become a magician beyond other magicians, almost god-like in her new-found ability. This could actually push Ceony into the category of a Mary Sue for me, which would be a shame when she was such an individual in the first book.

Lest you think I am simply bashing this book, with nothing nice to say, let me say here and now: it's good. Despite the bare-bones description of the world and the history behind the magic, Charlie Holmberg has created fascinating characters that are completely separate personalities from each other. The book is short, so any places that could feel a drag don't last long; and you're constantly along for the ride. Learning about the magic is always fun, especially when it is performed. Unlike other authors, Ms Holmberg is enjoying dragging the romance out, so you're not forced to deal with annoying couple gush

(except for that kiss at the train station!)

, although each member of that couple do separate gushing about each other. Reading this book is like watching an A-list Hollywood movie: you can visualize it all and it passes through your mind like a vapor. Don't expect your feelings on magic, romance, people, society or education to change - just sit back, relax, and enjoy.

This book is a slick little read - a tad too slick for my tastes. While Benny Lewis' passion comes through, and he gives good resources for different paths to language, this feels more like a money-grab than anything else. Another reviewer pointed out that many of the chapters in this book are covered (for free) on his blog; having done a little research, I can concur with this statement. In fact, many of the resources Mr Lewis shares direct you to visit his website. There are very few study tips worth mentioning - find someone in your target language to practice with, set goals, take exams if you can, and make up silly stories to remember vocab words - and the rest of the book is a passionate manifesto about language learning in general. Having read How to Learn Any Language (the website of which Mr Lewis cites in this book!), I think that if you have problems with Lewis' types of study tips, you'll get more out of HtLAL than FI3M. HtLAL offers several methods to attack the same topic, diverse enough to cover the three ways of learning (audio, visual, kinesthetic). Mr Lewis' passion shines through, however, and has boosted my interest in learning languages. (Working on my fourth!) For that ignition alone, it can be worth the read - but take a tip from the writer and find it on his blog instead.