Friday, July 1, 2011

The Dork Review: The Name of The Wind

Two reviews in one day. Shocking, I know. What can I say. I have the day off, I needed to get the last one off my chest, and I've been wanting to write this review for over a week now but stuff kept getting in the way.

Alright, I'm a little late to the party when it comes to Patrick Rothfuss and The Name of The Wind. Especially considering it was published in 2007 and mentioned in numerous places. Which it should have been, considering it was a New York Times Best Seller.

This qualifies as a Book I Wish I Had Written. No, really. I hope someday to produce something this magnificent. This book is layered, switching from third-person to first-person viewpoints with ease, telling two different stories involving the main character Kvothe at the same time. It's a story within a story. (I'm avoiding making the obvious reference to Inception. Oh wait, I just made it. Dang.)

I devoured this book. It's close to 700 pages and I had it read in a few days, stealing time between calls at work to read as much as I could. Heck, if I could afford the time off I would have taken a day or two just to read it. The book is that good.

Rothfuss does a great job of deconstructing how myths and legends are created. Kvothe himself is a living legend, and as the novel progresses we learn the hard truths behind a lot of the stories told about him and about the legendary evil that influenced his early life.

Rothfuss also avoids many of the fantasy cliches we've all seen before, without belaboring the point. There are no easy answers in this book, and often what you would expect to happen is either subverted, inverted, or smashingly averted.

If you haven't already, pick this book up. I've already started on the sequel, which just came out. Hopefully we're not stuck waiting too long for the third book, but I can understand how writing this good can take time.

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