By Christopher Paolini
A farm boy's mysterious blue stone hatches into a dragon, and overnight the two of them become the most wanted pair in an empire ruled by a cruel king.
Eragon is fifteen, a farm boy in a hard country under a cruel king. Hunting in the mountains, he finds a smooth blue stone, and one night it cracks open and a baby dragon looks up at him. That makes him a Dragon Rider, the first free one in a hundred years, and the king wants every Rider dead. When the king's servants come looking and his family pays for it, Eragon leaves home with an old storyteller named Brom, learning to fight, to ride the dragon Saphira, and to work magic while the whole empire hunts him. It's a true epic fantasy, long and sweeping, and by a good stretch the biggest, heaviest book here.
If your child fell hard for the dragons in Wings of Fire, this is where that love grows up. The bond between Eragon and Saphira, the two of them sharing thoughts and fighting side by side, is the same relationship they fell for, now drawn at full size and depth. The world around it is enormous: elves, dwarves, magic that runs on real rules, a whole invented language. And it's the first of four thick books, so if it takes, you've got a year or more of reading ahead. It asks more of a reader than anything lighter, in sheer page count and in weight, which is why I'd hand it to an older or stronger reader who's hungry for something bigger.