I started reading it last night and my hopes are pretty mangled. Those big chunks of Alex thinking about the past are awful, and when his thoughts drift to it in other sections, it's usually melodramatic. Sometimes they could have been good, if he'd only left those examples in and cut everything else.

The other thing I'm struggling with is Pushkin's dialogue. It reads like Paolini wrote out full English sentences and then edited them to have some of the errors common to a Russian English learner. It's inconsistent (as far as I can tell), which makes sense, but it's very jarring. For example:

“You mind?” [Alex] said.

The geologist hung upside down relative to Alex, floating there like a huge, flabby blimp, the fringe of his beard waving about his face. He slurped up a mouthful of the disgusting pickled dish. “No, I not. Haven’t you had shipkraut? Is good for digestion. Mmm-hmm.”

or: <You just bundle of laughs, aren’t you? – Pushkin>