Book Review: Brisingr by Christopher Paolini (Inheritance Cycle #3)

As you probably know by now, I really liked the first two books in the Inheritance Cycle. I absolutely adored both Eragon and especially Eldest for their world, characters, conflict, etc. But now that we’ve arrived at the third book, Brisingr, how does that one hold up? Is it an improvement over Eldest even? Let’s find out. This is Brisignr by Christopher Paolini. Spoilers ahead.

In this third installment, Eragon and Saphira return. They are both major players in the events to follow, including the slaying of the Raz’ac, goings-on’s in the Varden and Ellesméra, and even the election of a dwarven-lord. The conflict seems to be on the rise again, all coming together in a big climax battle where Eragon, Saphira, Roran and Arya once more have to stand against Galbatorix’s forces.

I’m going to be blatantly honest here. I did not care much for this book. It wasn’t horrible or anything, but when comparing it to the previous two, I felt that this one was just a really weak followup.

The most major cause of this is for me that there was just too much idling about for things to be really interesting. Eragon and Saphira just kind of go from place to place, take place in some local stuff that ultimately doesn’t add too much to the overall conflict to build up to the final battle, rinse and repeat.

In the second book we were in the same location for a long time, too, however there we kept learning all kinds of new things about the world of Alagaësia. In this book new things are barely brought up, making all this going from place to place to take place in some seemingly minor goings-ons rather annoying.

The climax had very little buildup and was just kind of uninteresting if you ask me. We are introduced to another Shade right out of nowhere as a miniboss, only for him to be slain in a couple of pages later. What even was the point of that, I wonder.

The characters are still good, and honestly one of the saving graces of this book. Eragon, Roran, Nasuada and Saphira continue to grow, which I can appreciate. I’m also slowly starting to warm up to Arya even though I initially didn’t care much for her. I could also get much more into Roran’s POV parts in this book, unlike in the last one.

The pacing also suffered because of the constant idling about. This book felt dragged out and I kept wondering when we’d leave this one location to move on to the next, which would hopefully be more interesting.

Another kind of annoying thing is that I could instantly call both Oromis and Glaedr would die as soon as they mentioned going to battle. It was bound to happen and honestly, that didn’t make things very exciting, because you could call it before it even went down.

So, yeah, overall, I’m not a huge fan of this one. It’s not bad enough to make me want to drop reading this series, but I definitely expected better after a good first book and a really awesome second installment.

Rating: 3/5