The world is divided into four elemental nations: The Northern and Southern Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Fire Nation, and the Air Nomads. The Avatar upholds the balance between the nations, but everything changed when the Fire Nation invaded. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, can stop them. But when the world needs him most, he vanishes. A hundred years later Katara and Sokka discover the new Avatar, an airbender named Aang. Together they must help Aang master the elements and save the world.

I made the mistake of watching the movie "Eragon" before I read any of the books. After reading just the first book you really realize what a hack job they did on the movie. Aside from special effects that really were quite good, the rest of the movie could have been put together in a much better way. I was captivated by these books more than I have ever been before. I couldn't put it down after I started reading, I would just get lost in the world of Alagaesia, that Eragon and his charasmatic dragon Saphira lived,fought and survived in. Christopher Paolini is a "fantasy world genius". I love the way he layered in many culturally different peoples ways of living and folklore along with their unique cities, towns and villages. It takes a brilliant,imaginative and intuitive mind to create a land the likes of Alagaesia the way he did. Not to mention that he started writing Eragon and graduated high school when he was but 15 years old. I would recommend this series of books to anyone that has an interest in fantasy stories, medieval times,sword fighting, dragons, elves/dwarves &amp; magic/folklore of elves/dwarves, or anything relating to any of these topics. I could go on and on about how great all 4 books are but you need to find that out for yourself. :)

I had removed this review, which violates Article 2 of the Terms of Use:You agree not to post User Content that: (i) may create a risk of harm, loss, physical or mental injury, emotional distress, death, disability, disfigurement, or physical or mental illness to you, to any other person, or to any animal.Looking at the comment thread, it is abundantly clear that the review not only may, but indeed has caused emotional distress to several Potter fans. I would like to offer my apologies to these unfortunate people, who had every right to expect better service from Goodreads. But, despite the above, I have decided on mature consideration that I will attempt an experiment: I am reinstating the original review, hiding the dangerous and inflammatory content inside a spoiler tag. If you are a person easily offended by negative comments about Harry Potter and still decide to click it, then you have only yourself to blame. You have been warned.(view spoiler)[I got into an argument the other day with an articulate 17 year old Harry Potter fan - let's call him D - who wanted to know why I was being so nasty in my review of Deathly Hallows. What was wrong with it? I offered various structural criticisms: the ending is abrupt and unconvincing, the subplot with the Horcruxes has not been adequately foreshadowed in the earlier volumes, and the book as a whole is overlong and boring. D expressed surprise that I could call Deathly Hallows boring, when I'd given five stars to Madame Bovary and Animal Farm, both of which he considered far duller. The discussion continued for some time. In the end, I said I would write a review summarising my objections to the series as a whole. Here it is.As I said to D, it's not the books or the author. The early Potter books are cute and entertaining, and J.K. Rowling seems like a nice person - if someone's going to scoop the literary Powerball jackpot, why not her? What I very strongly object to is the way the books have been marketed. About 10 years ago, it seems to me, some clever people figured out a new marketing strategy, which they first applied to Potter; when that came to an end, the same methods were used for Twilight. Both series have enjoyed a level of success which is utterly disproportionate to their quality, and which is also unprecedented in literary history. Twilight clearly follows Potter; I've had several discussions about what preceded Potter, and the answer, everyone seems to agree, is that there was no earlier success story of this kind. Before Potter, there was no YA series of dubious merit that absolutely everyone read. I think it's uncontroversial that Potter, in terms of literary quality, is better than Twilight, but Twilight has been even more successful. At one point, the four volumes occupied the top four spots in the New York Times bestseller list. On Goodreads, nearly half of the top 50 reviews are of Twilight books. This is an absurd and unnatural state of affairs. Even though Twilight may not be quite as bad as is sometimes made out - I'm one of many people who have tried to defend it - there's no way it deserves this level of attention.So why is everyone reading it, and why, before that, was everyone reading Potter? As I said, I think it's primarily about the marketing, though I wish I was more sure about the details. Here, at any rate, are some thoughts. First, the publishers are aggressively using economies of scale and deals with third parties. They print very large numbers of copies, and they work together with movie studios, game companies and merchandisers to cross-promote them. I think it's particularly important that a large proportion of the books are sold, not at bookstores, but at normal supermarkets. It's well known that the cover price is usually marked down to the point where the supermarket is not in fact making any profit; they have discovered that they can successfully treat it as a loss leader. This is causing great pain to independent bookstores. Some of them, I have read, have adopted the desperate expedient of buying copies at supermarkets and then reselling them. Second, let's look at the content and style. Even though Potter and Twilight are fairly different in some ways, they also have many strong similarities. Above all, they are extremely easy to read, at every level. The vocabulary is unchallenging; the sentences are short and simple; most characters are one-dimensional stereotypes; the story is uncomplicatedly plot-driven; there are few references to other works of literature. You can read these books if you're tired, if you're sleepy, if you have poor reading skills, if you've never read anything else. They consequently have a very large potential audience.Third, they describe a comforting, emasculated world in which most of the things that make our own world so difficult and unpleasant have been removed. Most strikingly, there is no sex; in Harry Potter, which is supposed to be about fairly normal teens, no one masturbates, no girls get pregnant, none of them are labelled sluts because they've had sex with more than one boy (sometimes one is enough, for that matter), no one gets their heart broken and drops out of school or starts taking drugs as a result, no one is stuck in a dead-end relationship that they wish they could escape from, but can't. The worst thing that happens in either series is the sequence in New Moon where Edward temporarily leaves Bella. Meyer notoriously doesn't describe Bella's feelings at all, but just leaves several pages blank. Once, in fact not so long ago, most adults would have been embarrassed to be seen reading YA literature of this kind; to start with, the comforting word "YA" hadn't been invented yet, and they would have been reading children's books. Somehow, there's been a shift in standards. You look around you on a bus to see what people are reading, and you can be pretty sure you'll see at least a couple of people over 20 engrossed in Potter or Twilight. It's odd that this has happened, and I wish I understood why.In conclusion, I couldn't help being struck by the two books D chose to contrast against Potter. D, Madame Bovary is going to outlast both of these authors because Emma is a real person who experiences the crazy and contradictory emotions that real people experience when they are very unhappy, and as a result she behaves in a crazy and contradictory way; also, Flaubert, unlike Rowling and Meyer, took a great deal of trouble over his prose, and created some of the most beautiful and ironic passages in world literature. There aren't many books I'd call masterpieces, but this is one of them. And finally, Animal Farm is indeed an allegory of the Russian Revolution. More importantly, though, it's about how smart, unscrupulous people manipulate trusting, weak people. Tens of millions of people are reading Potter and Twilight, not because the books are well-written or interesting, but because the readers have been manipulated into buying them by the Napoleons and Squealers of this world. That's what I'm objecting to. Think about it for a moment. (hide spoiler)]

Bobby Pendragon is a seemingly normal fourteen-year-old boy. But there is something very special about Bobby. He is going to save the world. And not just Earth as we know it. Bobby is swept off to an alternate dimension known as Denduron, a territory ruled by a magical tyrant, and plagued by dangerous revolution. If Bobby wants to see his family again, heâ��s going to have to accept his role as savior. Because, as he is about to discover, Denduron is only the beginning. . . .

before we start;a READERS ATTENTION!:Rick Riordan's series Order:first, Percy Jacksonthen  Heroes of Olympus at last, Trials of Apollo &amp; Magnus Chase is happening at the same time; they have crossovers sometimes.(or read in this order: Camp Half-Blood Chronicles)I warned everywhere I could, because I'm nervous you might read in wrong order &amp; you won't enjoy as much as you should.anyway...generally I love those fantasy stories happening in our world, they're apparently named low fantasy, but I call them: Fantasy in reality. (&amp; not just my favourite in books, but movies &amp; tv shows too)When fantasy elements bind in reality; we know a boring damn world (reality) &amp; then... magic came! or myths or travel between universes. I live in that world (as a reader lives a thousands of lives) &amp; I feel happy.also familiar sense in other way like I know places &amp; cities (I mean in almost all high fantasy stories I'm just confused with the strange names &amp; wondering where they were.)&amp; even heroes have been shocked when they actually entered their fantasy world. (so they know that world with me &amp; I can relate with their surprise, feelings, fears, etc)so it made very easy to believe they can be real, somewhere, somehow, in a corner of this world magic exists (Harry Potter), you can travel to parallel universes (Pendragon) or mythology lives among us. (Percy Jackson)my top fav series has another features too: they are about the subjects I actually love to know about in science. (magic, parallel universes, Myths)&amp; now whole review of one of my favourite series:Complete 5 Golden StarsIdea: ★★★★★/5I said thousand times that I love love love mythology, especially Greek mythology. -World building: ★★★★★/5mythology in fantasy, sign me in!I love how myths wrapped up in reality &amp; how this fiction built up. &amp; monsters, rules of this world, Demigods, villains... everything seems real &amp; realistic! I love realistic fictions. when you can just simply imagine the story is actually happening somewhere in this world. U know what I mean?

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