Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's hard to be too critical of The Name of the Wind, because there is a lot in there that is interesting. One thing that stood out for me was the slight obsession with currency. Finances are something that are routinely omitted from fantasy novels, but as Kvothe works his way up the income and prestige ladder it's kinda cool to have a real understanding of his financial situation, which adds an edge to the parts of his story where he is broke. I thought the imagining of magic in his world, the concept of Sympathy, was rather clever. But at the end of the day, I didn't care for The Name of the Wind, and I think the problem is that Mr Rothfuss greatly overplays his hand. He sets up a world and a character in the first few chapters of the book, a world which is currently in crisis with all sorts of unexplained things happening. We are then introduced to this retired adventurer running a bar, and the idea is clearly to bring Kvothe out of retirement to help deal with the world's ills. To do that, for some reason we need to hear the entire story of Kvothe's life to this point. In excruciating detail. So what we then get is 900 pages of back-story on the first, oh, 20 years of his life or so. Parts of the story are interesting, many are not. Some of the characters are interesting and very well-drawn, many are not. He goes through a flavorful and occasionally challenging existence and then has a short and marginally exciting adventure at the end. It's all a little ... well, boring. No risk, no drama, no confrontation of difficult choices, no struggle to succeed, little real character growth ... all the ingredients of a basically uninteresting story. One of the reasons I liked the money element of the book is because it's used so efficiently - a little bit about how much he earned or spent or what things cost is slipped in easily from time to time and it cheaply adds depth, interest, and realism to the story. Sadly, virtually nothing else in the story is so clean, and the book never attains momentum or has much tension. The real killer is that the character of Kvothe is simply uninteresting. He wanders around, does a bunch of stuff, excels at virtually all of it, but he never engages on a personal level, is never interesting enough to like, hate, or feel much of anything for. What makes it irritating is all the foreshadowing. We know there is a huge amount of story left to tell. We have to make it through another couple volumes of this length to tell Kvothe's entire back story, and then we can start working on the here and now that was set up way back in the beginning of book 1. So we're staring down the barrel of maybe 5000 pages to tell the story Mr Rothfuss has envisioned. Which is, quite frankly, grossly excessive. None of the characters in here are interesting enough to sustain that kind of page count. If we're generous, there is barely - barely - enough plot to sustain just this one book, which is carried mostly by good writing and to a lesser degree by some modestly interesting characters. But I have no enthusiasm to follow them through another thousand or so pages, never mind multiple thousand-page volumes. They are modestly interesting. Not compelling. I doubt that anything that is drawn out to this degree could ever be that compelling. What we needed here was an editor. Give me the best stuff of this entire envisioned world or series in three books of 300-400 pages each, and maybe we have something really good. Even better might be a collection of short stories with a novel in the middle or at the end. But The Name of the Wind creaks badly at 900 pages and does not give us enough to get emotionally or intellectually engaged in for this one book alone, never mind where Mr Rothfuss is apparently trying to take us. Look, War and Peace was only about 1400 pages. Tolkien told the entire tale of the Lord of the Rings in less space than it takes Mr Rothfuss to tell this quarter-finished tale. People always joke about Charles Dickens being paid by the word, but The Tale of Two Cities is only 300 pages or so. Why do modern fantasy and sci-fi authors feel compelled to put so many word on the page? Are they so arrogant that they can't admit that not all of their ideas are worthy of printing? This is ridiculous. Mr Rothfuss clearly has writing talent, too bad his editor and/or agent couldn't force him to tell one interesting story and finish it before his readers lose interest.