Inferno by Dan Brown - a Book Review

Known for his works The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Digital Fortress, and many more, Dan Brown has come out with a new Robert Langdon mystery/puzzle novel that took years of research and writing. With such anticipation for another thrilling book, most people will go into reading the book with high expectations. Just as well, fans of Dan Brown will probably enjoy the book regardless, not looking to criticize but just to read for pleasure. I fall into the latter category of readers, but still, I will dive into a review.

To start, I read that Dan Brown spent a couple of years travelling to all the places mentioned in the book and did extensive research about all statues, art pieces, and buildings in the book. As per usual, there is plenty of historically known pieces of art and architecture that play important roles, sometimes central roles, in the plot. Brown doesn't disappoint here as I enjoy being introduced to multiple pieces of history. All historical pieces were smoothly integrated into the whole storyline.

The whole book is based mainly on Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Inferno, part of his Divine Comedy epic poem. The book is based in Florence, Italy and Brown basically takes you on a tour of famous historical buildings in the area. All the buildings, paintings, statues, and stanzas from Inferno intertwine into one big puzzle that, once again, Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon has to solve in order to survive. You actually gain a pretty good history lesson about Dante's works and his personal life, but not in a boring way like sitting in a high-school history class. Comparing to The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, Inferno contains less symbology puzzles and more word puzzles. At first I was a little disappointed at this, but I got used to it eventually. Despite the lack of symbol puzzles, there were plenty of other types of puzzles to peak your curiosity and stimulate your thinking.

Moving onto prose, the story flowed smoothly just like all of Brown's other books. Each chapter is a few pages long at most, keeping the pace of the story fast and interesting. Again, you get the story from different point of views following the timeline of the plot. Brown also throws in a few twists and turns throughout the whole book, the most coming at the end. This leads to perhaps my only concern about this book. While the whole plot might have, and probably was, thoroughly planned and thought out prior to Brown actually sitting down and writing the book, there seemed to be way too many twists appearing the last 100 pages of the book. This almost makes the whole story seem a little unrealistic. However, in the end, it did not detract from the overall impression I got from the book. I was still well engaged in the book, often not being able to put the book down even though I definitely had to go to sleep. This is a good read for Dan Brown fans and anyone looking for a good summer read.

Rating: 8/10
While this book was engaging and interesting like all his other books, I still feel that The Da Vinci Code was a better read. The overboard number of twists near the end of the book and slight lack of symbols caused me to rate the book less than a perfect 10.