New Fractalverse Book Released

[torylltales]

It's true! A few industry insiders have let me know that Paolini is shopping a new Fractalverse book. He's sent the unedited review copy to a few people prior to it being officially announced, and I managed to wheedle a digital copy from a friend of a friend who knows a guy.



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To Suck In a Bed Of Roses Quick Review

[epistler]

Well, I didn’t believe it either, and yet here we are. Paolini actually went ahead and wrote the vaguely hinted-at romance novel.

It’s not out yet, but I called in a few favours and managed to get my hands on an early copy. I’ve been feverishly working on this for the last three days, trying to get my thoughts down before it’s officially announced. Seriously, this thing is so new it’s not even on Amazon yet.

To begin with the damn thing is massive, which is to be expected. My copy is 1,171 goddamn pages long. I had to pay more for postage than for the book itself, and I can’t put the damn thing down without trapping my fingers.

Most of those pages are, of course, filler.

And horribly written sex.

But I’d better start from the beginning.

To begin with we’ve got our main character who is, I shit you not, Fabio. Or at least Fabio wearing Paolini’s nerd glasses and sporting a lot of OMG MANLY chest hair. The guy is an even more blatant self-insert than Eragon was, and almost as big of a Sue. Not content with making him super attractive (according to all the other characters, anyway) Paolini also made him a bestselling author who also started out as a teenager, but in his case it’s thanks to being OMG SO TALENTED, with the nepotism discreetly left out.

Then there’s the love interest, Violet, who’s basically just a nonentity hiding behind a huge pair of luscious boobs. They meet at a book launch party, she’s his biggest fan, sparks fly, etc. Other than that there’s really not much here in the way of a plot. Paolini fills endless chapters with nothing but sex and descriptions of luxury cars and fancy restaurants, etc etc. Because, you know, Best Author Ever Preston is also OMG RICH.

There’s a weak attempt at some conflict about three quarters of the way through when another author who’s OMG EEEEVIL and JELUS decides to try and sabotage the relationship because of reasons, by revealing Preston’s Terrible Dark Secret From His Past. Which is that he… uh… saw his mother die. That’s literally it. He didn’t kill her or anything like that; he just saw her fall off a ladder and blamed himself like a big drama queen for the next fifteen years.

It doesn’t work, they live happily ever after, etc., except for the evil author guy, whose career is ruined forever.

And as usual there’s the ugly subtext we pretty much expect to find in any Paolini book. The Perfect Preston is supposed to be all dark and brooding and so on, but instead he just comes off as really controlling and borderline abusive (in fact, screw the “borderline” – in chapter seventeen when Violet thinks she’s pregnant, he all but threatens to beat her up if she tries to get an abortion. And this is played as "cute”). It’s Edward Cullen and Christian Grey all over again – Paolini can’t even be original when he’s being terrible.

Awful book, would not recommend. Next time, try Mills and Boon.