The Inheritance Cycle 1: Eragon
Author: Christopher Paolini Genre: Fantasy Year of Publication: 2002 Pages: 503
Writing: 3/10 Plot: 3/10 Characters: 1/10 Creativity: 3/10
Overall: 2.5/10
I hated this. This was awful.
If I wasn’t deadset on reading this whole series, I would’ve gave up halfway through this heap. For those who don’t know, The Inheritance Cycle is a popular fantasy series written by Christopher Paolini. Paolini was fifteen when he wrote Eragon and was able to get his book published because his parents owned a publishing house. Hooray for nepotism… It later became a smash hit, and I don’t know why. This was awful.
The Plot: Farmboy Eragon finds a dragon egg and he later becomes a Dragon Rider, an ancient order of knights that are long gone. Searching for the egg, the bad guys destroy his home and kill his uncle. Eragon flees with Brom, a wise storyteller turned magic-man. Eragon and his dragon, Saphira, try to hunt down the beasts that destroyed his life and they later find themselves in the middle of a power struggle between the evil king and the rebels. On his journey, he meets all sorts of characters, blah blah blah. It’s boring. This is boring. This whole book is boring as dirt. I struggled reading this dreck. This barebone, painfully predictable plot is drawn out way too much. This book should’ve been 200 pages. Not 400+! Most of the story is spent with Eragon and Brom sparring in the woods and traveling to different places. None of it is interesting!
The Writing: Ugh… you can definitely tell a teenager wrote this. The prose is mediocre but passable enough. There’s a lot of telling and barely any showing. Paolini constantly states how Eragon feels instead of showing us his reactions. It becomes frustrating when we get to any emotional scenes because we don’t really see Eragon showing well… emotion. We are told that “he sad” or “he happy” instead of descriptions of those emotions. This is something that a lot of beginner writers struggle with. It’s always more interesting to describe how your character is feeling than it is to just state it. Continuing, the dialogue is atrocious. It’s the worst thing in the entire book. Everyone talks the same. They use the same diction, they all have the same cadences, they all have the same “voice.” Whenever Paolini writes dialogue without speaking tags, I literally cannot tell who is speaking by the dialogue alone. Kings talk like farmers. Vagabonds talk like nobles. It creates this monotoned voice in my head as I’m reading.
Maybe it’s just me. I’m a stickler for dialogue and bad dialogue turns me off so fast.
Characters: They’re all boring. Eragon does not change throughout the entire story. His life was ripped away from him and it doesn’t change him. He’s still a whiny farmboy by the end of the story. Saphira, the dragon, is disappointing. For being this mystical being, she sure isn’t mystical or interesting. How?! How do you make dragons boring!? You can do whatever you want with them, Paolini! Why did you take the most generic route with your dragon? I really wanted to like Saphira, but her entire personality is just “dragon” and nothing else! Brom is a walking cliche. He’s a textbook example of “the wise mentor trope.” I hate him, honestly, because he’s just the exposition fairy. Murtagh, Angela, and Solenbum are the only characters I liked because they have actual personalities. Everyone else is not even worth mentioning.
The Worldbuilding: It’s just watered down Middle Earth. You got your elves and humans and dwarves, none of which are fascinating in any way. The world is really small which surprised me because of how much people praised the worldbuilding. The map is pathetic. There are not that many settlements and everything is really close. The world feels really small and crowded. I’m not a fan of that. The Urgals are just orcs, Shades are just evil sorcerers, dragons are lame as hell, and the ra’zac are like what? Reaper-like things? I don’t know and I don’t care. Nothing about this world is all that interesting.
The magic system is stupid and I hate it. It’s literally ( no exaggeration) “say the magic words, and then magic happens.” That’s the system! It baffles me that there are people out there who genuinely think the magic system is good and complex. What book did they read?! ‘Cause that’s not what I read! Here, let me just show the magic-explaining-scene, because it’s stupid.
Brom took a deep breath and said, “To work with magic, you must have a certain innate power, which is very rare among people nowadays. You also have to be able to summon this power at will. Once it is called upon, you have to use it or let it fade away. Understood? Now if you wish to employ the power, you must utter the word of phrase of the ancient language that describes your intent. For example, if you hadn’t said brisingr yesterday, nothing would have happened.”
“So I’m limited by my knowledge of this language?”
“Exactly,” crowed Brom…
Pages- 145, 146
That’s the system. That’s it. “Say the magic words and then magic happens.” I despise this because it’s way WAY too simple and it makes any acts of magic really dull and uninteresting. Magic is supposed to be cool, right? This isn’t cool! There’s one scene in the book that made me fume. Eragon is trapped by the bad guys and they gave him a drug that inhibits his magical abilities. They administer this drug through his food and water, something Eragon figures out immediately. So for like a day, he just stops eating and drinking and the effects wear off. Once they wear off, he literally just says the magic words for “unlock door” and the door unlocks and he walks out. It’s lame as hell and I hate it so much. Why not make a device like a collar or manacles that are infused with magic-inhibiting magic that can only be unlocked by the person that created them (or a key)? Have Eragon actually use his brain for more than two seconds to solve a problem. Any obstacle that he faces, he can easily solve by reciting a vocab word. When he, Saphira, and Murtagh are crossing the desert, they’re worried that they won’t have enough water. So, Eragon just remembers the magic words for drawing water out of the soil and now their problem is solved with no effort whatsoever. Granted, doing big spells sap his energy, but he has Saphira, the dragon with an endless magic supply, so like it doesn’t even matter. It’s just lame.
I cannot stress enough how much people praise the magic system. I don’t get it! It sucks! Why can’t the system involve hand signs instead of magic words? That way Eragon “learning how to do magic” isn’t just him memorizing vocabulary words! Hand signs, symbol drawing, I don’t know, literally anything else that isn’t what it is already.
This sucked. I struggled to get through this. I had to resort to listening to an audiobook at 2.4 speed just to finish it. I don’t like audiobooks, but I had to get through this. I’m on a mission to read all four of these books. I’m hoping that they get better later on because this first one was awful.
Recommendation: Literally no one. Some people on Goodreads say this is a good intro for beginner fantasy readers. I disagree. There are way better fantasy books out there. Don’t read this.
