See also the review of Part One
When an athlete has a remarkable first year in their sport and then fails to live up to the expectations generated by his accomplishments in his second year they call it the sophomore jinx. While there's equivalent for talking about works of fiction there are plenty of examples of an author scoring a success with their first novel only to stumble badly with their second. An even stranger phenomenon is what I've taken to calling the curse of the second book.
It seems to be something that is reserved for trilogies, especially those in the fantasy genre, and is something that I first became aware of when reading Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. The first time I read the books, it was The Two Towers, the second book in the trilogy, that almost prevented me from finishing series. While the battle scenes are of interesting enough, and the Ents are fascinating, the trek through Mordor with Frodo, Sam, and Gollum was tedious. However, it's not just Tolkien, I've seen the same thing occur in other trilogies, where the second book is the weakest of the series.
Unlike an opening book it lacks the excitement inherent with starting something new. Nor is there a rousing finish to look forward to like there is in the concluding book. When I was an actor I quickly learned that while it was very easy to recreate either emotional highs or lows, mid ranges were another matter all together. How could you make yourself interesting to your audience while portraying something somewhere in the middle? That's much the same conundrum that the writer of a trilogy faces when he or she is needing to keep their audiences attention riveted without the emotional peaks that are built into a beginning or an end.
Perhaps it worked in Christopher Paolini's favour that I read the second book of his trilogy as part of an omnibus edition, The Inheritance Cycle: Eragon & Eldest, containing it and the first book. Yet I'm inclined to think that even if I had read Eragon (the first book) and Eldest (the second) as separate editions it wouldn't have mattered. Eldest is not only as good a book as its predecessor, but in some ways I think it may even be better. For not only is Paolini able to sustain the interest in the story and the characters he had begun in his opening chapter, he managed to draw me deeper into the story.
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