Where the Heart of Anti-Shurtugal Rises Again.

Having gotten my hands on a copy of the new book, I spent a good chunk of my day reading it (I'm a fast reader and it's short). Here's my quick 'n' dirty review:

-Eragon is still a whiny, entitled asshole and Saphira is still a jerk
-Paolini attempted to write a child protagonist. It didn't work.
-There are some interesting hints in the story about Murtagh, but the whole thing ultimately had me groaning because it contains a truly ludicrous fight scene followed by some painfully out of place "comic relief". Yes, I'm afraid the "Mister Stabby" thing actually happened, and it's even more painful than it sounds because of how poorly placed it is - the child protagonist goes from witnessing a bloody fight to the death in which her father was injured and she was in very real danger to joking about Mister Stabby the Magic Fork. Like nothing happened.
-Scars are now important badges to show you're a survivor... but it's still a requirement to magically remove them so you won't be ugly.
-Angela's story tries to be clever and fails miserably because of how poorly written it is, and Angela remains an obnoxious unfunny jerk. On top of that her backstory is more science fiction than fantasy, and clashes horribly with everything else as a result. I'm not kidding - it's full of stuff about planets and mucking about with time and reads like a ripoff of Doctor Who. And apparently Angela can teleport. Paolini also jerks the reader around by saying Eragon learns about how Angela and Serious Ass first met, without actually revealing any of the details - just that it was really interesting, but fuck you, you don't get to see it.
-The story of the urgal girl who goes up against an evil dragon is just a drag. There's no tension, no character development, the style is inconsistent, and it ends on a boring anticlimax, a fact not helped by Paolini's continued inability to write effective action scenes by always writing them at arm's length rather than being in the moment.
-The framing story about Eragon in his new home ends on another anticlimax. A new dragon hatches, you don't get to see it, the end. Woo.
-The book is all fluff, no substance. As usual.

What can I say about it that's good? Well, for one thing Paolini seems to have dropped his obsession with elves; there's zero harping on about their amazing perfection and beauty, and Eragon himself has stopped licking their boots. He also doesn't seem to mind being labelled as human.

No Roran. The jackass isn't even mentioned.

The Murtagh story hinted at some interesting developments and introduced a mystery about some nameless new threat, which goes frustratingly unexplored in favour of a bunch of tacked-on schmaltz about Murtagh teaching a little girl some Important Life Lessons.

Elva gets some interesting development as a powerful but naive kid who doesn't know how to have a place in the world other than by being a jerk to people.

Overall verdict: