<i>The Name of the Wind</i> is Awesome

If you like fantasy novels and/or redheads, you will like this book.

Schephs: *********- 9 out of 10

Read an excerpt here.

Well, I think you can tell right away where this review is going. All of the accolades that this book (and debut author) received are well-deserved. I read on Patrick Rothfuss’ blog that he spent about thirteen years crafting the world, story, and characters. Let’s just say it’s time well-spent, and the care given to all of these elements shows.

Kvothe (pronounced almost like “quothe”) is by and far one of the best real people I have ever read about. Character, what? Yes, he has character! He’s not real, you say? LIAR! BEGONE FROM MINE EYES!! I saw him with my own two eyes…and I keep hearing his voice in my head; it’s getting a little crowded in there…. Oh, and now you’re saying the other voices aren’t real either? THAT’S IT.

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Fine, I’ll finish the review. (Willem Dafoe…narrating a Merrill Lynch commercial…weird….) The people in this book are awesome, just like the name of the wind is awesome (and hard to spell). The description is another favorite of mine, because it elucidates the setting and/or the characters without interrupting the flow of story. It’s really quite fantastic. It also has a very interesting non-linear narrative, switching from third-person present to first-person past narrative as Kvothe tells his story.

So. Kvothe is a name of some legend in this world, but in the present storyline he is living the quiet life and mentoring a young man named Bast. Through his story, the idea of what it means to be a hero is thoroughly explored–through the heroic, unheroic, and the accidental Kvothe and the Hero become more than just characters on a page. There are also a lot of subtle pokes made at traditional fantasy fare (like using leagues as a measure of distance, or galloping madly from a town when there is an urgent rush, and other references that I can’t recall off the top of my unwashed head), although in some ways, in exploring the hero, Kvothe’s story is very traditional. He is and he isn’t. It’s hard to explain. I did enjoy the touch of arrogance and boastfulness that begins his story; it added some real old-school class, a la Beowulf. I enjoyed the lack of pretense regarding Kvothe’s extraordinariness. You know the type: the main character seems ordinary, but extraordinary circumstances are thrust upon him/her, and oh…it’s a hero! HERO IN A BOX, just add dragon, yours for only $24.99! (Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read many stories like this and enjoyed them immensely, but this is a refreshing change.) But Kvothe, from the beginning, is extraordinary and not only do others see it, but he knows it as well. And so what? This is the other side of the coin:  if extraordinary circumstances are not thrust upon the character, then the character is extraordinary and s/he finds those circumstances because s/he is on a Quest. This leads me to one of the things I enjoyed most about Kvothe’s journey thus far (oh yeah, this is the first of three): if his intelligence helps him out of extraordinary difficulty, it also, like as not, helps him into it. He’s the example for “too smart for his own good.” So, despite his extraordinariness, there are many difficulties encountered.

So why is one scheph missing from what sounds like a ten out of ten? Well, it likely has more to do with my personal preferences than anything. It starts off slooooooow. Understand that it would be difficult to start a story with this sort of narrative another way, but that doesn’t change the fact that it starts slow. Now, plenty of people don’t mind this one bit. They like the slow buildup to more intense sequences. I, however, like to get tossed into the middle of some action, preferably with people being slaughtered in pools of their blood and dying dreams. I then crawl out from the wreckage, survey the scene, and savor trying to put the pieces together into a story. That being said, this story is ostensibly about Kvothe and so naturally when he begins to tell his story, he starts from the very beginning, his childhood. It’s all very well-written, and from the perspective of the end of the book I can see that it probably wouldn’t work in another format. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I started reading this back in February, I got about 270 pages in and set it aside until last Thursday, April 8th, in favor of some action-filled stuff (comics!). Call me simple if you will, but I have to read things all the time that I don’t want to (college and such) so if I’m not as entertained as I want to be by my free-time reading, I’m not putting the time into it. Anyway, glad I picked it up again, because as a whole this book is AWESOME.

Read it!

NOW.

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The hell are you waiting around for? READ, ALREADY! Also, go to this link and demand that PR come to zip code 89502! POR FAVOR! Alternatively, demand that he go to Comic-Con 2010.

Oh, yeah. Saw him at Comic-Con 2009 and that’s where my interest was first piqued because he seemed to have a lot of fans in the room and he was very well-spoken (and not afraid to speak up) as part of the fantasy panel he was on.

I just thought you should know that.

If you’re going to be snippy, you can just go.

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