The Inheritance Cycle

I read the Inheritance Cycle books a few years ago when I was a junior in high school. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed with how the whole series turned out. The first book started out innocently enough with Eragon getting to know Sapphira as well as other characters along the way. Some of the world is a bit hard to digest at times as a ton of information is dumped on the reader all at once, but you get used to it. What really starts to go wrong was when the book introduces the magic system. Magic in this world feels incredibly strange especially compared to other high fantasy stories like the Lord of the Rings and the Witcher. In the latter stories, magic is well-defined with certain objects, potions, or spells accomplishing specific tasks much like you’d imagine modern-day tools or devices to operate. In the Inheritance Cycle, magic is basically anything you want it to be as long as you have the strength to perform it. In this sense, magic became this arbitrary tool that could either accomplish whatever needed to be done, or it could put up roadblocks and challenges depending on what the plot needed. There was literally a scene where, in the middle of a battle, Eragon could have used a reservoir of magic to help him, but because the plot needed to happen a certain way, he simply “forgot” to use it. Going along with the magic system, the characters also use a liberal amount of telepathy to communicate with one another. It’s fine if a dragon is talking telepathically to someone as that is their primary means of communication, but when full-length conversations take place purely within someone’s mind, it can be hard to follow along with what is happening.

The story itself is fine but nothing special. Many people will say that it’s basically Star Wars in a fantasy setting, and they’re not entirely wrong. Eragon does lose his guardian at the beginning of the series only to go on a journey with a powerful mentor. The continent is primarily ruled by a fascistic empire with a megalomaniacal King who tried and mostly succeeded in killing all dragons and dragon riders from the world. Honestly, however, the Star Wars similarities are not what made me dislike this series. If this was simply a trilogy of moderately sized books that retold one of the best stories of all time in a new, fresh setting, I would have been perfectly happy–even with the strange and arbitrary magic system. Instead, the Inheritance Cycle stretched out a perfectly fine story over four ungodly long books. I thought Eragon was a tad too long for the story it wanted to tell, but that first book is nothing compared to Brisingr and especially Inheritance. It’s not like, say, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which describes an entire school year filled with mysteries and twists that keep you wanting to read more even with several filler segments. Brisingr is nothing but over 800 pages of filler with another few hundred pages of filler in Inheritance until the final climax. There’s nothing worse than reading hundreds of pages of a book just wishing for the plot to get rolling.

Overall, I don’t think the Inheritance Cycle is the worst thing in the world. I’d gladly take these books over the modern YA fantasy crap any day. However, I think the series ultimately falls flat for a poorly defined magic system and far too much filler for such a derivative story.