Started: 17/02/18
Finished0: 7/03/18
Spoilers: Yes.
3.5* A big review for a big book. I have a lot of thoughts on this one, so bare with me.
I've been wanting to read this for years but have always put it off. At 662 pages it's a rather daunting prospect. At the same time, I was anxious to pick it up. I wanted so badly to love this book. I wanted so badly for this to be a favourite of mine and sometimes the sheer amount of hype surrounding a book is enough to scare away readers.
But once again I find myself in that strange literary limbo-land where I'm trying to like a book everyone loves and I'm just not getting it, wondering if I'm the problem.
Like any form of art, I'm perfectly capable of appreciating its mastery and brilliance and the talent of the artist while also accepting it's not to my exact tastes.
By no means did I dislike this book, I actually really did enjoy this, but my god did it ever drag. I'm going to try and articulate my thoughts as clearly as I can despite how indecisive I feel about this book. I don't want to in any way seem harsh and unfair to the author with this review, but I need to be honest (for my own sake).
Characters
Okay, okay, so we've all heard of 'Mary Sues' right? That female character that struggles through life but just so happens to be amazing at everything she does? Yeah. How exactly is Kvothe not a Mary Sue?
Don't get me wrong, I grew to quite like Kvothe as a character as the book went on (probably took me longer to warm to him than I wanted, but I got there.)
All the same, is there anything that Kvothe doesn't excel at?
I liked him but I never felt like he had any particular weaknesses. He lacked humility and, to a certain extent, lacked humanity. I mean, everybody sucks at something. Nobody can be great at everything. So what's his weakness, other than his poverty? I don't have a shit-tonne of money either but I don't consider that weakness, that's just circumstance. So what are his weaknesses, exactly?
He's also fearless, by the way. He even says so:"I had a reputation for reckless bravery. But the truth is, I was merely fearless." This made him difficult to relate to and almost made it hard to sympathise with him . . . until you remember his dark and brutal past.
Kvothe is an anti-hero, to say the least, and I love that about him but sometimes I can't decide whether I actually like him or not. I was invested in him and his story, but the only things about him that I truly related to were his hair colour and musicianship.
It was quite slow going for me, so it wasn't until I was halfway through when I realised how much I liked Kvothe's friends. Wilem, Simmon and especially Sovoy. I don't know what it was about Sovoy that I loved so much, I just know I loved him.
Now, normally I don't care much for the portrayal of female characters. I'm no feminist and I can engage in any character whatever their gender (and quite often prefer male protagonists), but I imagine for many female readers that the few ladies featured in this book will pose as a problem.
So the first proper female character we see is Fela. Immediately she is discriminated by her own university master when he tells her to cross her legs so the boys don't get distracted. This is so cringy and uncomfortable. I would understand it if it was to make an impact, a recurring theme, or perhaps to show how badly female students are treated, but this kind of behaviour literally never happens again and no other 'female discrimination' happens during the university scenes.
Like I said, I'm not a feminist, but this completely random attack against this female student annoyed me. It didn't prove anything, it didn't set the tone for anything and it didn't accomplish anything other than to make me cringe. The next time we see Fela, she's getting sexually harassed by Ambrose in the Archives lobby. *eye-roll*
As For Denna, she was the exact opposite. She was free and easy and pretty much stepped out with any guy that looked at her right. I'm not slut-shaming her, people can be as promiscuous as they like, but generally promiscuous people also have personalities outside of their promiscuity. Denna was such a bland character to me. She was probably meant to be a bold, strong, empowering female character but she totally missed the mark with me. I didn't find her interesting, mysterious or sexy, or anything really. She was merely a love interest to Kvother and I think if all romance scenes were cropped from the book, the story wouldn't suffer for it.
Two characters I particularly liked:
1: Auri (which give me great hope for The Slow Regard of Silent Things). I found her really sweet and carefree. She was sort of like a cross between Luna Lovegood and Smeagol (not Gollum, of course), always in her own little world, naive, trusting, full of child-like wonder and utterly harmless. She was charming.
2: Elodin. He was so odd. Unimaginably clever but also borderline insane (a character trait I love) He took Kvothe under his wing in the end and proved to be a pretty interesting character. Unconventional and mysterious.
But frankly, there are so many characters in this book that it's hard to mention them all.
Plot
Plot-wise I'm 50/50, and this is where I struggled most whilst reading.
So this book is basically story-ception. It's a story within a story. Kvothe - now presumably in his late twenties? - owns an inn and is hiding away from the world, until a chronicler finds him and asks for Kvothe's life story.
This first part, set in what we'll, for now, call 'present day', is written in third person, as are all the Interlude chapters peppered throughout the book when they take toilet breaks. The rest of the story is Kvothe's rendition of his own life from age ten onwards, and this (majority of the book) is written in first person.
The main story of Kvothe doesn't actually start until page 52. Perhaps those initial 52 pages aren't packed with any useful or purposeful information, but I suppose they set the scene and introduce the characters. The bits with the scrael were interesting, but I thought perhaps it could've got to the point a little sooner. I'm not the fastest reader in the world so after several hours of reading, I learn that the main plot (Kvothe's story) hasn't even started yet!
A word of warning for the weary: this book is a slow-burner.
The thing is with this book, for such a BIG book, very little actually happens. The synopsis on the back gives the impression that it'll be an epic fantasy adventure jam-packed with action. I was ready, barely containing my anticipation for the rollercoaster I expected this book to be.
I wanted to see Kvothe steal princesses from sleeping barrow kings, spend the night with Felurion and leave with his sanity and life, and do all the stuff mentioned on the back of the book. Unfortunately, I didn't get much of this. Instead, all I saw was Kvothe struggle to juggle his lessons, wallow in student debt and bicker with Uni bullies. And this goes on for hundreds of pages, literally.
Where was the action promised on the back of the book?
Okay, granted, so he does in a sense burn down the town of Trebon, but that entire debacle with the dragon felt . . . I dunno, pointless? Even now I'm trying to figure out what point it served. He didn't actually gain anything from it except for a couple of nights sleeping under the stars with Denna. He didn't get rich from it to pay off his debts, he didn't discover anything about the Chandrian, he didn't sleep with Denna, he didn't gain anything. I found the dragon storyline exasperating, drawn-out and unproductive; word count for the sake of word count.
And on the same note of word count, as much as I appreciate a detailed and fleshed out fantasy story, I don't really need to know every lesson that Kvothe attends or every tale of folklore in history. I kind of feel like this could have been edited down a little, and I'm quite surprised it hasn't been. I get that a lot of the 'tales' were important to the forthcoming storylines, but there was absolutely a couples that had no relevance and just confused me. (A story within a story within a story.)
3/4 through the book I was wishing something interesting would happen during the 'present day' setting (another scrael attack, a fire, anything) just so we had a reason to be drawn from story-time and actually see some action. I wanted to see older, jaded Kvothe more; he was way more interesting than arrogant 15 year old Kvothe we had to put up with for the entirety of this book.
That being said, the final quarter of this book is the best bit. I felt more tension and drama during the lute smashing scene with Ambrose than I did through the entire dragon scenario. Less can be more. I really felt Kvothe's pain, his anger, his loss of self-control when his lute broke, and the scenes that follow this were the most interesting throughout the whole book. This is what I came for. Shame it came a little late.
Setting
Credit due where it is rightfully deserved. The world-building was on point.
This was one hell of a developed world. There were countries and nationalities, religions, languages, cultures, histories, lore. It was certainly rich in imagination. Nobody can deny Rothfuss that.
I've always thought that the setting is the most important character of any book, and Rothfuss got it spot on. The world is definitely up there with the greats: Middle-Earth, Westeros, Narnia. It's so developed. It's perfect.
One feature I found particularly interesting was the magic system. I found the idea of Sympathy, the act of binding one object to another, incredibly cool and original, but again as interesting as that was, I was more intrigued by the art of Naming, and was constantly waiting for Kvothe to dabble a little more in Naming.
The world-building was so vast and so creative and so intriguing that all I wanted was to see more of it. Then Kvothe went to the university and everything went on hold. It almost felt like the whole world went on hold. I never really got the impression that the world was continuing to live with or without Kvothe.
Do you understand my meaning? It's hard to describe, but I guess to me it felt like the places and the characters only 'existed' when Kvothe was around to interact with them.
This is a fascinating, developed, vibrant world that should feel more alive, like a living, breathing thing, a character in its own right and I really hope I get to see a lot more of it in the next book.
Writing Style The writing was good, nothing groundbreaking, but good all the same. It wasn't packed with prose or poetical writing but I think that was probably the point. Either Patrick Rothfuss simply doesn't write that way, or he was more conscious or Kvothe's story telling than we give him credit for.
Cause that's all it was, Kvothe telling a story. If I told you the story of my life, I certainly wouldn't muddy it up with metaphor. With this in mind, and the fact that this is story-ception, the 'to-the-point' writing style fit perfectly.
In the third-person 'present day' chapters I found there was far more prose, which made sense to me. The writing within some of these chapters was truly beautiful and conjuredwonderful imagery.
There were quite a few humorous moment in here too and, yes, I did laugh. Like I said before, I didn't dislike this book. The banter between Kvothe and his friends was such a welcome relief from the otherwise stressful life Kvothe leads. It was nice to see him interact positively with other characters and equally as nice to see Kvothe act like a fifteen year old boy at times.
The dialogue was also fantastic. Can't fault it and wouldn't want to try. The best examples of how great the dialogue is can be found when Kvothe is simply hanging out with his friends talking about nothing. It's how friends talk. It's real and it's believable.
Also, big shout out to the way Rothfuss describes music in this book. Any musician will appreciate and understand this. His detailed descriptions on how music makes Kvothe feel are so deep and so raw that it's enough to make one look at their own instrument of choice with longing in their eyes. (I certainly eyed my bass a few times whilst reading this).
Final Impression
I want to continue with this series simply to see the action-packed adventure story I thought this book would be. I have every hope that the next one will be more to my tastes as I'm assuming we'll see an older version of Kvothe after he's left the university.
Just because I found this book really slow doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. I have every intention to continue and I'm feeling pretty positive about it.
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