"Inheritance", Christopher Paolini

'lo everybody. I'm not quite dead yet! (Senior year is pushing me pretty close, though.)

I'm aiming to next review "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern, which is a fabulous book that everyone should read. It's probably gonna get higher than a 4.

I, of course, am making no promises as to when this review will go up. In the meantime, please find attached a review of one of the most-anticipated fantasy books of our generation. :3

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A version of this review originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of the George C. Marshall high school newspaper Rank & File.

It took Christopher Paolini a full three years to finish Inheritance, a culminating novel that no one, least of all Paolini, originally planned for. I'm not sure if it was worth the wait.

Paolini’s ascendance into the spotlight of the high fantasy genre began at the age of 15 with the 2003 publication of Eragon, a tale of a boy named Eragon and his dragon Saphira.

Eldest followed Eragon two years later and Brisingr followed Eldest two years after that. Paolini’s immature writing in the first book left the archetypical framework upon which the series is based—the hero’s journey—exposed, drawing the ire of critics, who accused him of borrowing ideas from Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

Regardless, the 509-page Eragon was an impressive feat for a high school freshman, and the writing and content of Eldest evinced a maturity and depth that belied Paolini’s youth. Unfortunately, Inheritance possesses neither of these merits.

Inheritance concludes Eragon’s journey and resolves most of the remaining questions of the series, yet the entire ordeal feels alternately rushed and bogged down. In the first two novels, Paolini had clarity of purpose in his writing: Eragon had a very specific goal he was trying to achieve, and the majority of what Paolini wrote consisted of Eragon either trying to achieve or failing to achieve his goal. In contrast, much of what Paolini writes in Inheritance describes how Eragon comes to be in a position to pursue the main conflict, rather than what he actually does about it.

This difference allows Paolini to introduce a great number of irrelevant scenes into the plot. Some of these are of genuinely interesting and entertaining interactions between the characters, but many are simply egregious.

Roran, Eragon’s cousin and the only major “normal” character in the series, has two significant chunks of the book devoted to him. Half of Roran’s sections could be cut or significantly trimmed without noticeably altering the book.

At the end of the book Paolini, instead of writing too much, rushed things. The chapters in the aftermath are all written in a detached and summarizing style. The ending is one of the most emotionally powerful moments in the book, yet this manner of writing, which populates a departure sequence that lasts for pages with the merest snippets of dialogue, robs it of much of its impact. It feels as though Paolini simply wanted to quickly wrap up all the loose ends in the plot.

Honestly, this sort of criticism is painful to write because Paolini’s writing has such potential. The man has powerful ideas and the writing style to express them. He just remains unaware of proper pacing and narrative structure, and the way a dearth or excess of certain scenes can destroy them.

3.25/5