Eating crow, book-flavored crow
Written: Oct 02 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: strong writing and world building
Cons: smug main character who is too too special
The Bottom Line: Read if you are willing to start an incomplete series and like long, epic fantasy.
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| jsgoddess's Full Review: Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind |
If you had asked me 3/4 of the way through this book if I liked it, I would have said yes, but with a big caveat: I hate framing stories, and this book's framing story is more intrusive than most.
Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind is a story of an innkeeper with a secret identity. He is in hiding, of a sorts. Hiding from his past. Hiding from his future. Hiding from his gifts. But he is famous, and he's eventually found by someone who wants to hear his story, all of it. So Kvothe proceeds to tell him, with a few interruptions along the way, and rather a lot of editorializing.
There's a self-consciousness about stories with this sort of framing device, an agenda. It's also obvious that things will work out, in a fashion. After all, there is an innkeeper alive to tell the story, even if he has changed his name and is merely waiting to die.
Kvothe begins his tale as a child with the Edema Ruh, a gypsy-like people with great musical and dramatic gifts. He is a strange, driven child, and not particularly sympathetic. He will continue to be not particularly sympathetic through the entire volume. I found that the characters who wanted to smack him around had my complete support most of the time.
Most of the other characters are less well realized, though that feels natural within the frame of this story. This is all about Kvothe--his history, his talents, his pain.
And if you like Kvothe, which I didn't much, that would be an enormous strength of the novel. If you don't like him, you might find yourself wishing the whole thing were shorter--and that he wasn't so cussed smug.
Still, the story is a good one. This is a fantasy, so there's magic, but it's not easy, throwaway magic. Magic in this world has consequences. Everything has consequences. There is a realistic set of action and reaction, where things feel like they happen for a reason and not just to further the plot. People behave in ways you would expect normal people to behave, that is until they behave in ways that reveal they weren't normal people to start with.
Kvothe's story goes from childhood through mid-teens. If you're like me, you will constantly be brought up short when Rothfuss mentions Kvothe's age. Unfortunately, I found myself rolling my eyes more than once at him being fifteen and acting like (and being treated like!) he was thirty.
The setting is that same typical fantasy technological level, with fires and horses and no electricity or steam engines. I wish I understood why this particular level of technology is so appealing to fantasy writers.
Rothfuss's writing is strong and he establishes Kvothe's dominant voice quickly. I preferred the third-person omniscient framing scenes to the first-person flashbacks, but again that was due to my slight dislike of the main character.
And 3/4 of the way through, I finally found out why the frame was there in the first place, which reconciled me to this particular storytelling style--at least in the particular book.
This is the first in a new series and very much incomplete. While I'm looking forward to the next (which is due out in April), I tend not to recommend series that aren't yet written. Robert Jordan's death is too fresh.
Still, this is a strong novel, not a copycat work. It's too long but it does cover a lot of ground and sets up the rest of the series nicely.
It's just too bad I know that Kvothe is going to survive it all.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jsgoddess
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Member: Julie Carter
Location: Ohio USA
Reviews written: 140
Trusted by: 199 members
About Me:
Come, gaze upon the newbies and ply them with ratings!
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