Riding the Dragon

Paolini’s youth is a central point of his greater story, but there are many aspect of that point beyond the generic question “He’s how old?” that are important to consider. From a unique perspective (see his bio) Dtruitt examines the similarities between the story Paolin wrote, and the story he lived, as the Eragon phenom enon caught fireand swept the world-and in the process underscores just how unique an achievment it is for a child to create, sell and survive an extraordinary story

Eragon, as most reading this know, is the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who gets a dragon’s egg by accident. When the dragon hatches, he bonds to it and becomes its “Rider.” But his problems have only just begun. He is living in a kingdom governed by the evil Galbatorix, a Rider who wiped out all the other Riders and dragons apart from the thirteen evil Riders who had joined him, their dragons, and three eggs. So when evil servants of the evil king kill Eragon’s uncle (with whom he is living because his mother mysteriously disappeared after his birth, and never named his father), Eragon specifically sets out to get revenge, though he has other motives too. The book was published internationally in 2004 but had been published at the author Christopher Paolini’s home before, in 2002. Like his hero, Paolini was fifteen when he began writing it (though he was nineteen at the time of its international publication by Knopf).

What I find interesting in the bald story of Eragon is that the book contains an obvious symbol of the process of its own creation. The plot concerns a child, a child learning something he would not otherwise know about or know how to do. Just as Eragon in the book learns about riding and looking after dragons, so Paolini learned about writing, and about publishing and self-promotion. Both of these sets of skills—dragon care and writing—are things you would not expect a child to do, let alone (alas, the prejudice against the young creeps stealthily in here) be good at. The world of Eragon is just as surprised at the boy’s maturity as the world of books was at Paolini’s achievement. No wonder, then, that there is a clear parallel between the dragon, Saphira, and the story itself. I cannot say what Paolini’s experience of writing was like, but I can say from my own experience of writing that, like Saphira, stories do have a tendency to come up with ideas of their own about where they want to go, and it is very hard to get them to change their minds. They take you on long flights, and you don’t always know where or when those flights will end.

There are other parallels between dragon-rearing and writing. Both of them are enjoyable and make you feel as if you have a special and secret identity that makes you different from other people, even your family. Most people think both sound really great. But just as most writers can tell starry-eyed dreamers about the negative side of being an author, so Paolini shows that being a Dragon Rider has a downside: Dragons are uncomfortable to ride, and your specialness attracts lots of attacks. As well, the dragon eventually grows beyond your control, as books do when they go out into the world . . . no writer can control the way a book is going to be read. Just as there are other, older writers, so there are other, older Dragon Riders for Eragon to meet. And riding a dragon, like writing, is in some respects a leveling experience: Small children can make up really brilliant stories, and a teenager like Eragon is boosted to adult status by owning a powerful dragon. As another essay in this volume shows, Eragon’s youth doesn’t stop him winning arguments with his elders, and often being right.

As for the second book, the very title says that it’s all about age. Eldest is the oldest dragon alive in the world, Glaedr. (The word eldest might also refer to Murtagh, Eragon’s older brother. They are both fathered by evil Morzan.) Glaedr and his Rider Oromis are authority figures for Eragon, and train him to be a Rider. They learn an ancient magical language (echoes of Le Guin and Tolkien) and Saphira learns combat flying. Education, education, education! Glaedr and Oromis replace Eragon’s parents as authority figures. Is this to do with Paolini himself breaking free of the parental help he stresses so heavily in the acknowledgments to Eragon? Philip Pullman says that everyone’s story begins only when they realize they’ve been born into the wrong family. This is Eragon’s story too.

The third book too shows Eragon learning and mastering various skills, from the making of his new sword to more advanced fighting and spellwork. Arguably, by this book Paolini has more comfortably settled into his role as a writer, even as he has grown older, and this book is less about experience than about what all writing should be about: telling a story, and telling it well. Even the sly cultural references he slips in show a growing ease with his storyline, a willingness to play with the boundaries of his universe.

But while all this is true and very important, the point I find interesting in the story of Eragon is the age of its author. I will now attempt to explain why.

We are, so very often, told that we are at the pinnacle of freedom. Every adult can vote, has rights, yet those rights are not completely unrestricted so as to preserve the rights of others. But this is all a rather glorified lie. We are not at the pinnacle of freedom yet. There is one last group, one final minority everywhere, that has not achieved the rights and responsibilities that normally come with freedom.

Children.

They have no political rights, and are condemned for working, just as women were fifty and a hundred years ago. (Being condemned for working goes with low wage rates, or none, as women and illegal immigrants could tell you. So could the kids who work for fast-food chains.) Through my discussion of Eragon, I will focus on one space where many children have tried to break this rather oppressive mold: authorship. There are several published child authors, most of whom write children’s fiction. I am one of these. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of other children who write and finish books. There are also many children who write and don’t finish books. Yet there always seems to be a semi-negative reaction if you tell any adult about your writing. A taken-aback response. (Here comes a whinge about my own experiences.) Some adults begin rabbitting on in an embarrassed way about how clever I must be and how great it is. I am not sure what they expect me to say my book is about, but when I say it is a retelling of Greek myth that brings back into it the original stories’ grittiness, they put on very shocked faces. Alternatively, they go into aggression mode, asking me how much of it I wrote and how much my mother did, asking me why it is under a pseudonym, etc. Yet the recurrent theme of the reactions seems to be surprise that someone my age can have written and published three books, have finished the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh and be revising them (some however I have decided are irredeemable and am simply throwing aside, or reincarnating), and have begun the eighth and ninth. Surprise, or shock?

This adult surprise and even alarm are the themes of this essay. I want to study the reactions toward child authors of children’s fiction from both adults and children, taking as my example Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr. My interest in Paolini’s achievement is that of a reader, a child reader, but also that of a fellow writer, a fellow child writer. We will see later why it’s important that I am not only a reader, but a child reader, and not only an author, but a fellow child author.

Eragon and Its Critics

Eragon has been praised, but has also attracted some very intense criticism. Why did the book divide opinion so strongly? To try to understand people’s dislike (or, indeed, their like) of Eragon I took a look at some reviews on Amazon.com. Most people’s reviews are either one star or five. There appears to be no median. There are tons of good reviews, several bad reviews, but very few in between: nearly twenty five- and four-star reviews, and seven one- and two-star reviews, but only one three-star one. But what is more worrying is the content of the reviews. Almost all the negative ones either say it is bad because it is derivative, bad because of its style (only one, and much of it was misspelled), or bad because it is in the style a teenager would write in. One of the others was attempting to get you to burn the book (!). And the positive ones are almost all incorrectly spelled and grammatically wrong. I can understand a few reasonable typos, but they can’t ALL have happened to misspell several words. Does that mean they are not very experienced reviewers—i.e., children? And the content of the positive reviews is the sort of thing the other reviews are criticizing: a lack of depth and critical commentary, and an uneasy use of playground slang, with clichés and descriptions of the book as “cool” abounding. One five-star review just states the fact there will be four books. Most of them simply stress how great the story is, and nothing else at all. I know this isn’t a proper study, that Amazon.com reviewers are a self-selecting sample who don’t represent anything but themselves. But in the global village of Amazon.com, I still feel worried at this lack of inbetweeners, rational people who are trying to see the book’s good points and bad ones too. This lack of a median is not actually typical of Amazon.com reviews. Most frequently reviewed books attract four- and three-star reviews. Not this one. I can see that there are two different types of people reading the book, yelling at each other with fervor rather than engaging in rational debate. Why?

Reviewers’ Criticisms

The bad reviews often stress what they say is Eragon’s terrible style and derivativeness. Here is an example: I am quoting it in full, with any spelling and grammar mistakes intact, because the details are important:

Though the book starts off slightly strong the book becomes weak eventually. I actually put it down half way through. The dragon rider idea was pretty great the first time I read it . . . when it was called “Dragonlance.”

I enjoyed the dragon’s growing and coming of age. The bond between Sapphira and Eragon was attractive at first, but the book then becomes basically a journal of a LONG journey to a SHORT distance. Like a “and then they walked. and then they slept. and then they walked. and then they fought.” For a quest where everyone is supposedly looking for them, there is a remarkable lack of an antagonist after long chapter;s

This book is great for someone who is a novice writer about a subject that he adds nothing to. If you have a child who has no introduction to the realm of fantasy reading (and I don’t mean Harry Potter; not that its bad, it’s quite good, it’s just a diffrent realm of fantasy), then sure, let them read Eragon. Otherwise, i’d recommend the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The starting book is “Dragon’s of Autumn Twilight.” And if you want some grit to your fantasy, I recommend Icewind Dale trilogy by R.A. Salvatore. starting book is “The Crystal Shard.” There’s not alot of dragon’s in the latter trilogy, though it actually adds a new dimension to the fantasy realm.

As we can see, the first point is driven home very clearly: “The dragon rider idea was pretty great the first time I read it . . . when it was called ‘Dragonlance’.” The author is actually wrong; the first time I know of that the idea of dragon riders was used was in Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, the first of the Dragonriders of Pern books (it was published first in 1969, while the first Dragonlance book was published in 1987, according to the Library of Congress catalog). But the force of the point is still clear. Eragon is derivative of Dragonlance, which is in turn derivative of Dragonriders of Pern, which is also probably derivative of something else—and I think the something else is actually pony books. Only the first clause of the preceding sentence is the reviewer’s point; the rest is my natural extension. In fact, the reviewer praises Dragonlance to the skies, and I wonder, since he has not spotted that Dragonlance is derivative of Dragonflight, whether he is correct about Eragon’s derivativeness as well, or just trying to find an excuse to criticize it. Can it be that we tend to assume that a book by a child will be more derivative? More dependent on grownups? Is this a way of coping with the idea of a child author?

The reviewer then follows this swiftly with a point about one thing he likes about Eragon: “I enjoyed the dragon’s growing and coming of age”—the aspect which might owe the most to Paolini’s own age at the time of writing—but then launches another attack on the book, this time on its narrative. I would say that this does have some basis in fact, but all long books have lengthy sections that are just as he describes. It’s always really difficult to explain why you find these boring in one book and gripping in another (and actually boredom in general is very hard to explain anyway). But the last paragraph is the truly telling one. The first sentence is “This book is great for someone who is a novice writer about a subject that he adds nothing to.” It is obvious that the “novice writer” of this sentence is Christopher Paolini, and that by “novice” the author of the review is implying youth and inexperience combined (interesting since the reviewer has several grammatical and spelling mistakes in his review). The final sentence makes it sound as if the whole review has been written in the light of the reader’s knowledge of Paolini’s age.

Is this interpretation of the novel fair enough? Let’s imagine how it would sound if the reviewer wrote the following:

This book is great for someone who is a woman writer about a subject that she adds nothing to.

Oops. There would be protests. There would be outrage. People would ask Amazon to take the review down.

Or:

This book is great for someone who is a Black writer about a subject that he adds nothing to.

Oops again. See above for the likely response. Immediately it’s obvious that “this book is great” now sounds really patronizing. Why? Let’s try to think it through.

Are Children Subalterns?

Canadian professor of literature Perry Nodelman has said that children are “the last subalterns.”¹ Subalterns are defined by another professor, Homi Bhabha, in his article “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism” in Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, as “oppressed, minority groups whose presence was crucial to the self-definition of the majority group.” Children are a minority group with different and fewer rights than the dominant group (adults). The term “child” is often defined in ways that confirm adult power and authority; for example, children are seen not as different from adults but as inferior to them, less competent, less clever. And yet this also means that children who step outside their role—children who write books, perhaps?—are seen as a threat. Homi Bhabha says that “subaltern social groups were also in a position to subvert the authority of those who had hegemonic power.” Maybe that’s why child authors have to be pushed back into place. Negative reviews of Eragon often make a real point of Paolini’s age. You’d almost think they were trying to discourage kids from publishing books, just as women were discouraged in the past. And it must be depressing if you are an adult who has maybe not found a publisher for your own fabulous fantasy to see Paolini walking away with a big book deal as just a teenager.

But children, apparently, have different brains from adults. It’s been suggested that the frontal lobes do not fully mature until young adulthood. To confirm this in living humans, UCLA researchers compared MRI scans of young adults, 23-30, with those of teens, 12-16. They looked for signs of myelin, which would imply more mature, efficient connections, within gray matter. The researchers concluded that “this increased myelination in the adult frontal cortex likely relates to the maturation of cognitive processing and other ‘executive’ functions.” The careful word “likely,” however, suggests the researchers had a hypothesis, not data, about the function of the frontal lobe. The researchers also found that “[p]arietal and temporal areas mediating spatial, sensory, auditory and language functions appeared largely mature in the teen brain,” but chose to place much more emphasis on differences than on these obvious similarities. A different group of researchers worked on face reading, and also found just what they were looking for: Kids’ brains are immature. “Young teens, who characteristically perform poorly on the task [of face reading], activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other ‘gut’ reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance.”² So children are different cognitively than adults. However, unsurprisingly, this information comes straight from adults. Can we trust adults to interpret the data fairly? And while maybe we can agree that there are absolutes in judgement in driving a car—the choice that avoids an accident is obviously better than the one that doesn’t—is this fair when applied to reading, and writing? In reading, younger readers might be willing to embrace more possibilities without ranking them so strictly. Who is to say that children are wrong to pick out one character to love, or to focus on the story and not on “fine” writing? Maybe it is okay for the amygdala rather than the frontal lobe to rule responses to dragon flights, imagined or real? And how is the amygdala working in adults who write for children? Is anybody testing them to see if their powers are in decline? (Thought not.)

Some people might also object that children can’t really be subalterns because they won’t always be children; one day they will be adults. To an adult, childhood seems short. But adults forget that children don’t know what it’s like to be an adult. They can’t look forward to it as if it were the end of a short-term stint in jail. They only know their own subjugation. In that sense their disadvantages seem never-ending. Plus time passes much more slowly for children than it does for adults—another big difference for readers. For children, eons go by while reading a long book like Eragon. All this means being subordinate seems endless, even if it isn’t. Besides, what other subordinate group would be willing to be at the bottom of the pecking order now on the grounds that in, say, fifteen years they would be regarded as the equals of their tyrants?

Anyway, Harvard professor James Wood recently complained that adults are too limited in their literary judgments as well: “A glance at the thousands of foolish ‘reader reviews’ on Amazon, with their complaints about ‘dislikeable characters,’ confirms a contagion of moralizing niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader ‘couldn’t find any characters to identify with,’ or ‘didn’t think that any of the characters grow.’”³ Wood thinks judgments like those of the adult reviewers of Eragon are “foolish” and “feeble,” so such adults are not up to Harvard standards, perhaps? It seems adults are not a happy and harmonious group of brilliant critics who can give a strong lead to young writers. Wood’s criticism of the very rules Eragon falls foul of suggests that not all adults agree about what a good novel ought to be like.

Another argument against children really being adults (and therefore having the same rights as adults) is that children have less experience. I can reply in two ways to this. The first is that we do not universally apply this principle; if we did, the oldest people would have the most rights, and that is far from true. This principle is only used against children and is therefore unfair. The other point I’d make is that a person of eighteen has little political experience. According to these guidelines he should then not have political rights. But what happens when he becomes a young person of nineteen, still as inexperienced as he was the year before? The gatekeeping grownups are faced with the same choice and must make the same decision or else they are hypocrites. And so on. He’s twenty and inexperienced. Then he’s twenty-one . . . fifty-nine. And they can never give him any power because of his total inexperience. According to this argument, no one should have political rights. This is clearly not the case. Again we only apply this to children; hence it is useless and unfair.

Also, in the case of those who write for children, what use is experience if it actually means your mind is crowded with models that can’t work for your target audience? You are busy creating characters that “grow” and “develop” because you have been in a writing course. Meanwhile your child readers are asleep, and so is Professor James Wood. Only the adults of Amazon are listening. Are they the people you set out to write for?

The Good Reviews

But what about the good reviews? Here is one of them (again, with any spelling and grammar mistakes left intact):

Eragon is a book about a boy who finds a blue dragon egg. The egg hatches into a dragon he names Saphira. Toghether, they travel with a man named Brom, and a fierce warrior named Murtaugh, to find the secret city of the Varden. They feel that they can use Eragon’s fighting and their magic to help the Varden defeat the evil king, Galbotorix.

One of my two favorite parts of Eragon are when Eragon finds out how Brom knows all he knows about dragons and magic. Brom knew that Eragon would need to know everything about the powers he had possesion of to be able to help the Varden. Also, I really enjoyed the fighting between Eragon and the Shade. It was a difficult fight, but Eragon knew he could win. The only way to kill a Shade was to stab it in the heart.

Eragon is easily one of my favorite books, and I have read a lot of books. It’s a book you never want to put down. You never stop wanting to read the next part. It’s a great book for people who really like both adventure and fantasy books. Also, it has a lot of great fighting scenes. The battles have great discriptions, and you feel like you’re in it. It’s a long book, but that can be a great thing, because you won’t want to put Eragon down.

The first thing anyone would notice when reading the review through is the spelling. Not only are basic words like “together” misspelled, but the characters’ names as well! This is surprising, since in my experience the odder a character’s name is, the more likely you are to remember how it is spelled and how you think it sounds. And all the characters in Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr have odd names. Then there is the unwavering focus on the story. The review tells you that the story is great, but does not analyze the style or sources of the story, or even how the story is told. The reviewer’s favorite thing about the book is part of the story, not a bit that is well described. And this reviewer doesn’t seem to have heard of Dragonlance or Dragonflight and couldn’t care less about them. Even more worrying is the misreading of the only thing the reviewer is interested in: the story. They are not (at least at first) travelling to the “secret city” of the Varden. And the Varden does not have just one secret city (though the one I think the reviewer is referring to is the most important), but many. Murtagh joins them much later, after Brom dies. And the way to kill a Shade will always be the same so “was” should be “is” (this may just be a grammar mistake, but if the author knows their grammar it is an inexcusable misreading of the text)! But the final blow to this review, the sting in the tail, is that it was written by a child. (It says “child’s review,” and in our blithe and trusting way, we are assuming it’s not fraudulent....)

Is my analysis of the review negatively biased because of this? If I had not known that it was by a child would I have read it differently? I am not sure. I am now beginning to veer close to the slightly odd position that not even a child can review a book or piece by another child without at least a tiny bit of bias against the author. Why? A great Victorian woman writer who wrote under the (male) pseudonym George Eliot once wrote a vicious attack on other women writers called ”Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Why was she attacking her own kind? Well, to show they weren’t her kind, of course. All subalterns tend to identify with the values of their masters, and I am no different. Part of me wants to show my maturity by ripping into this reviewer and then Paolini.

Children and Taste

So there is a division within me as a child author between the adult values I’ve learned and my reluctance to accept values that leave me in an inferior position. And there’s also a division among the Eragon reviewers on Amazon. Assuming reviewers are describing themselves truthfully, just under half of the top reviews are by children. All of the bottom reviews are by adults. But the most interesting thing is that children either review it favorably, or don’t review it at all. Or at least that appears to be the case. Are the children who dislike it (for there must be some, not all children will like it, I know some who don’t) so upset about this that they don’t review it? Could it be because a child will simply give up on a book that s/he doesn’t like? Or is it the more fearsome notion that children can’t review critically?

I would not say it was the last, or indeed the first, of those points. I am not sure about these worrying facts. For worrying they are: Eighteen adults reviewing a child’s book? What happened to adult fantasy fiction? Can it be that some of the hostile adult responses are warning kids off what has become a bit of an adults-only playground, children’s fantasy writing? Take Harry Potter. The biggest Harry Potter conference, Lumos, held in Las Vegas, actually forbids children under fourteen from attending. Most Harry Potter fansites are run by adults and for adults. So it’s not very surprising that the same is true of Eragon fansites. Is there any room for child readers, let alone child writers, in fantasy fiction anymore?

It would be a sad day for Paolini if children were shut out completely, because the Amazon reviews show one thing very clearly. Children generally like the book. What are, in fact, children’s views on the Inheritance Cycle? Do they all like it? Probably not. But if so, why aren’t they saying so? Let us try and answer the first question.

In general, as readers of any and all books, children appreciate story the most. They tend to overlook the style, at least on their first reading, and try to be swept up, and into, the story. They often don’t want the kind of stylistic flourishes that adult readers like, and give prizes to, because they can jolt you out of the story and into an awareness of reading, of what critics call texture. As a child, I don’t always want texture. I want to be carried away and to forget that I’m reading at all—mostly, anyway.

An interesting question arises about why a book’s style sometimes gets in the way of the book being absorbed and why it sometimes facilitates it. For lots of Paolini’s adult critics, his prose seems clumsy, and a longing to criticize and correct jolts them out of the story; some adults have the same experience with Harry Potter. But kids don’t mind Paolini’s use of words like tenebrous. There has to be a first time to hear big words like that. Child readers might get just as drunk on them as Paolini did. And we’re more used to meeting words we don’t understand, and don’t feel offended in the way adults seem to be.⁴ When I meet a word I don’t know, I don’t think the author is trying to show he’s cleverer than me. I can look it up, or I can just ignore it, or I can guess it from the context. Or just enjoy the sound. Children probably have this experience more often than adults, unless the adults read James Joyce all day.

Anyway, what children want is to get on with the story, damnit, and never mind the prose style. This means that reading, for them—or should that be us? After all, I am a child—is about expecting things to happen. If the book promises a fight with the big bad they expect it to occur, and will be disappointed if it doesn’t have a fight with the big bad. And since he’s the big bad, they, urm, expect there to be a big fight with him. Lasting several chapters, of course, and not just three pages. In other words, if the author makes a promise, they expect him to keep it, and if he doesn’t, they become very disappointed. Paolini is very good at fulfilling his promises, and so children like his books. Some adults find the pace too slow. But this is because Paolini is thorough. He does what he says he will. Children appreciate that. So do children have different aesthetic criteria? I am not sure, and I would not like to say since I am veering close to a view that suggests “children are different and special,” which is not helpful for anyone, least of all children.

Children are also, because of the fact they bury themselves in the story, more held in suspense. So even though an adult may sit there wisely noting that at the end of every third chapter Eragon faints, children eagerly press on without noticing this, at least when they read it the first time. This also means children can sometimes second-guess the author, when very well read in the sort of book they are reading. This can be very upsetting and disturbing for child readers, and may cause them to become disillusioned with the book. As well, it means that in a series children usually have a lot of ideas about what is going to happen in the next book and if they are completely wrong, then they will often turn against the book. It’s therefore really upsetting when wiseacre adults can’t resist pointing out what’s obvious to them in a fantasy book; the adult takeover of Harry Potter fandom is a case in point.

Children’s continuations of stories in their minds are often reminiscent of fanfiction, and I am beginning to wonder whether children don’t prefer to write in an already made universe and just add to it than to make up their own. I am perfectly capable of making up my own universe, but sometimes don’t feel like it. Sometimes I want the ease and coziness of snuggling into someone else’s universe. After all, that’s pretty much a reflection of life as a child. The universe is made by previous generations—parents, teachers. I fit in as best I can.

Eragon and Me

But what, indeed, of my view on Eragon? As a child, surely my view is as important as other children’s. So what do I think?

When I first read Eragon (I was ten, and I’m fifteen now) I was sucked into the story. It seemed exciting and interesting, and I honestly wondered from moment to moment what would happen to the characters. I really liked it.

The second time I read it (still ten) I noticed more than one fault. Previous bits that had seemed incredibly exciting now seemed dreary. When I first read it I adored the battle at the end. The second time I found it boring and repetitive. Interestingly, I did not have the same experience with Eldest. When I first read it I found it boring and incomprehensible. The excitement of the first reading of the first book had been reduced to what seemed like an endless cycle of Yoda-like anecdotes.

Recently, to write this essay, I reread all of Paolini’s books. It had been a long time since I read them (save the third, which I had read fairly recently), and with an older, and perhaps much more critical eye, I reappraised them.

I was, again, sucked into the story. But unlike last time, when I had been fully immersed, it was more like sitting in a bubble, or maybe watching it on TV. You are absorbed at the time, but later you see its gaping faults. For instance, I began for the first time to notice just how often Eragon became unconscious at the end of a chapter. And how overworked the description was. I later read an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin about fantasy, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” and noted with interest how much of the language she criticized crept into Eragon (though her main foe, ichor, never appeared). And while I am talking about language and description, Paolini’s style is slightly confused. He often switches from modern idiom to archaic language in the same sentence. This became jarring.

As well, my favorite parts of the book changed. As I have mentioned, when I first read it I felt that the battle at the end was exceptional; now listed among my favorite parts are the mock sword fights with Brom.

Am I being unfair and biased in my criticisms? Probably. But I think from this we can learn an important point, more about what we choose to read than about Eragon itself.

Whenever we read, we choose a particular thing to read. Often it may be the wrong thing. It turns out to be boring, or doesn’t suit our mood, or it’s total pap and we feel we’ve been suckered. But we pick it nonetheless; we have power and also responsibility. Whatever our age, we all need what I like to call, in my childish way, “stretch” reading and “relax” reading. Let us take the reading brain to be an elastic band. Difficult books stretch the band. Easier books relax it. Your mind needs both difficult and easy things. Read too many difficult books and you become worn out and unwilling to read at all. Read too many easy ones and it becomes impossible to read anything more difficult. We must learn to strike a balance, something which many of us have lost the knack of. Maybe children need a bit of guidance—but adults do too, or they wouldn’t be rushing out to buy The Da Vinci Code. Without that guidance we might all find ourselves the victims of marketing ploys, like the new Scholastic series where the games and plastic toys are already planned to accompany the purpose-written books.

**Learning from Eragon as a Child Author**

So what have we learned? Looking back over the text, it seems I have raised more questions than I have answered, or know how to answer. Can it be that we have learned nothing after all this questioning?

No. We have learned a lot. We have learned that adults, upon learning that a piece of work is by a child, begin to read in a different way than they normally would. They read in the same way teachers do when they mark a piece of work: analytically, critically, looking for faults. They focus less on what may be good and instead turn to what is worst. Whereas children, in what may be just as bigoted a way as adults, tend to notice only the story and nothing else. Both of these are equally silly ways to read a book. Both of them are too focused and require expanding. But how? I am not sure, though I feel sure someone else will have a plan, maybe even an answer, that I cannot spot.

But one problem has been bothering me the whole of the essay. Is Eragon the best example? Are there other, better examples of child authorship I could have used? Of course there are other child authors, that we all know, but is Paolini the one I should have chosen?

Of course, many other child authors have received similar receptions. A French child author named Flavia Bujor also wrote a children’s book called The Prophecy of the Stones or The Prophecy of the Gems (there appear to have been two publications under different titles), and it too has been called derivative and overwritten. In fact there was one reviewer on Amazon.com who directly compared it to Paolini’s work: “People have criticized books written by young authors such as Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and Christopher Paolini but let me tell you, their prose is Shakespeare compared to Ms. Bujor.” Again, the focus seems to be that though it is adorable that the child author is writing and not hitting his or her friends over the head with trucks, he or she has no skill whatsoever. Should I have, perhaps, added another example, then, for a broader, bigger picture? I do not think so, since I would only have been able to focus on one child author and his or her work, or else confuse everything by constant switches from author to author. And I have only read Paolini’s books, and of course my own (on which I have a naturally biased view, which is why I didn’t choose them).

For, at least in my opinion, “child authors” are but mere one-minute wonders that flash like a supernova across newspapers and then fade, probably just about as annoying as the celebrities who think the bedtime stories they tell their kids will make a great book. I see why people find us a pain. Stories on child authors always regard them as special, because they are children and authors, and so do not treat them in the same way as adult authors, so they behave differently. So maybe the answer to the problem that child authors face, vast opposition, is to treat them equally with adult writers. Which is actually what I want, and why I publish under a pseudonym. But the reason they aren’t treated that way now is child labor laws and education laws, which prevent children from being forced to work by their parents or adult friends. So maybe, though I at least think there could be a median, we have a straight choice between liberty and safety. Maybe child authors and readers have to be patronized to keep other children safe from exploitation. But which is better? And which should we, in all honesty, choose? But that is not my question, and though I hope it may be answered, I at least do not have that answer.

Another way to think about child authors, child readers, and child reviewers is simpler. One day they will be adults. Many great writers wrote books when they were children. Among children’s authors, Louisa May Alcott, J. K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson did this. Among adult authors, Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf all wrote stories, poems, and pretend newspapers as children. Inside every child author is an adult author who will one day emerge. Christopher Paolini has already emerged, and it will be interesting to see the result.

Michael Dowling, sole author of this essay, is one half of the author Tobias Druitt; the other half is his mother, Diane Purkiss. Their books are Corydon and the Island of Monsters, Corydon and the Fall of Atlantis, and Corydon and the Siege of Troy (forthcoming in the U.S.), all published by Knopf in the U.S. and by Simon and Schuster in the U.K. They retell Greek myths, but the monsters are good and the heroes cowardly. They have also been recently translated into French, by Stan Barets, and a number of other languages, including Czechoslovakian. Michael is fifteen and has started school at Abingdon. He’s been homeschooled for eighteen months, like Paolini.