y

These books are pretty awful but they keep dragging me in. I think it has something to do with the fact that they're almost there, I can see the intention, the idea, the shape of things, and I love the potential. 
In execution, however, it never lives up.

The first thing that must be spoken about is Kvothe, the main character, whose flaws, biases and travels are supposed to make up the entirety of the trilogy. When we meet Kvothe, he has ‘retired' from a life of adventure and has bought an inn with his fairy boyfriend and listens to tales of his long life of mad exploits as told by locals. Kvothe is wise and reserved and all-knowing due to his interesting life. Fine, it's classic, an interesting framing, whatever. 

Then it is revealed that he is – at MOST – in his late twenties, and most of the time he was doing his daring deeds he was no older than sixteen. Okay, so Kvothe is a bit of a child genius, a savant at all things. And I mean all things. There is nothing he can't handle or learn within twenty-four hours. In two books he spends barely a year at the university, and he still becomes a Super Wizard and knows all his way through the unknowable archive. 

(Side note: a character is described as unbelievably old and decrepit at some point and then it's revealed he's 40 years old. I laughed very hard.)

His biggest issue is money, he's poor all the time, and he spends more time trying to pay tuition fees than in classes studying when he visits the university. Once again, a nice idea, who doesn't love a magic school plot point? The tuition fee thing was interesting the first time. And it got progressively less. I had hoped we'd leave it behind with the first book, but no.

One of my biggest issues is that to me, it felt more like I was reading a D&D campaign. When the DM is really strict and you have to spend the whole time getting money only for a vital quest item to take it all away again. Only it's okay because you have some contrived reason that everything works out fine in the end. Kvothe has all his skills max-statted. All it takes is a set time of ‘training montage' and he's got that skill locked down. 

Ok so now for my points containing spoilers:

 I'll be brief as I'm boring myself almost as much as the Adem training scenes.
What the fuck was going on with the Felurian bit? We got to about 60% in the novel and everyone including Kvothe's teachers told him – you need to go to the outside world and Have Sex. So every plot point after that is just Kvothe Has Sex for the rest of the book. And after that, he's ‘mature' and experienced now, (even though he's still like 16) so it's totally fine when all these older women have sex with him.He breaks Felurian's spell by remembering being raped as a child as he is being raped in the current moment mentally and physically. This gets him to summon magic which is cool. Ok that could have been a really poignant moment you know. But then somehow it's all fine??? And he forgets about it?? And he just has loads of sex with his ‘would be rapist' because it's her nature? And it's fine????When he saves the sex-trafficking victims from their rapists he literally ON PAPER says ‘Not all men' to them. I was in disbelief.  And then when he says women enablers are worse than male rapists because they know what they're doing... Even not touching whether that's true or not, it doesn't even make sense for Kvothe's character.  Despite him being a victim of rape, there is still this constant idea of men being immune to it, while women were nothing but objects of it. It was baffling and offensive to me in a personal capacity. Where the fuck did Tempi go? What was the whole point of all that. I felt so bad for him – imagine betraying everything you've ever known, your family, your life, your society, to teach this guy that makes you a little horny, and then he comes with you to your sex-positive society and you don't even get a thank you, but he DOES fuck most of your professors/revered elders.
Complaints featuring my theories of what's going on (probably wrong, but still):

Okay Denna is the moon or the wind or whatever and also a faerie (she can't touch iron, she's always going between Fae and the real world all the time). Great, love that. Kind of hate the concept that ‘great magicians' learn magic by metaphorically seducing and having sex with the hot female personification of a concept. Whatever.

I assume this has something to do with the Chandrian being gods/demons of death/disease (doors of stone=doors to death) vs the normal ‘gods' of elements like the hot females. And the naked lady on the cup is the moon from the story of Jax/ Iax and could be Felurian or Denna. And then the Amyr are now the Adem and Kvothe is going to become an Amyr and fight the Chandrian in book 3 and save Denna from the Fae or something. And her patron is Lanre who is Hexior or whatever his name is from the Chandrian. And then he's also Taurpalin the Gross or whatever. All of this could be cool. Great. There's potential.

IN WHICH CASE... Why did you spend 2000 pages telling me about Kvothe going to school? About him making lamps? Even when he's playing chess with his grandfather or whatever is more interesting than him going through admissions for the five hundredth time. It's not as if we learnt something other than what pranks he was getting up to or what alcoholic drink he was currently into. No wonder there's so much to go for the next book. It feels to me like this series was discovery drafted, and Rothfuss was trying to find out the plot while writing it. THAT is what Editors are for folks! You have to go back and revise to make it a good story. :) 


I didn't hate it even though I did a 30000 page rant review that is incoherent as it is 1am and I've been listening to the audiobook for the last 8 hours. What gets to me is that Patrick Rothfuss has the greatest of intentions and is so desperately trying NOT to be a misogynist all the while refusing to interrogate his own biases and beliefs that it actually makes it feel worse. It's the same with gay people. With the little interlude about being Ambisexual or whatever, and the explicit idea that people in this society can be gay or bisexual or whatever and often are stated, as well as the fact that ‘Kvothe is a gentleman to women' – when Kvothe constantly does his ‘all men need a good woman' and ‘wenching' and ‘women are like alien creatures' shtick it just makes him sound like a homophobic misogynist even if he isn't.

Advice for male writers maybe. Don't try to write ‘a woman', just write a person and give them she/her pronouns. If Simmon doesn't become a prostitute, fall in love with Kvothe instantly and have great creamy tits, your female characters don't have to either. 

Anyway BYE. Patrick please email me I will edit your book for free and we can make an awesome book 3 ok. I think your soul is good and I am heartened by your depiction of the Roma.

???? Baffled by the direction this book took. The beginning with the worldbuilding and characters started with a lot of promise but went quickly downhill. It also took me a very long time to read. I'm glad I never have to hear about Firth again. I assume he's a siren because otherwise him and Nami's relationship is just egregiously bad. It still is but at least then it would make some kind of sense.

The ending was particularly ridiculous, but I'm not going to waste words.

Also, can we stop pretending books are for Adults when it's clearly YA fantasy with the characters 'aged up' in body (if not in voice).

Sorry, I really wanted to like this! :(

This is not adult fantasy this is YA

Where was the architecture?! There were a lot of sentences that didn't make sense on a prose level (what is a “supine-voiced woman”?) and the world building was very flimsy - there's a whole debate about ‘imperialism' and ‘colonial legacy' however it's a reference to the North of a country taking over Southern jobs...that's not imperialism or colonialism, you can't have intranational colonialism/imperialism...This may all sound pendantic, but every element of the book had these slips and they all built up to completely pull me out as a reader from an otherwise enjoyable gothic romance. I also had issues with Effy's characterisation. I don't know why every character in books released recently in adult or young adult sound like a petulant twelve year old even when they're supposedly university age. Even young adult- I promise you the teenagers and kids you're writing for are smarter and have a much more mature voice than you think. Also as someone who has gone through a similar situation as Effy I was disappointed by the way it all seemed easily resolved by the boyfriend at the end. Other than that, there were some parts - especially the excerpts at the beginnings of chapters, that I found particularly excellent. Reid can hit on a delicately gorgeous and meaningful sentence, but unfortunately for me the gems were few and far between as most of the lines that sounded beautiful actually didn't mean anything when you thought about it for two seconds. This review probably sounds harsh, and I'm sorry for that, but I was very much looking forward to the dark academia architecture school ocean gothic fantasy novel that I was promised and didn't get.

STEM student discovers the humanities. Thomil and Carra my beloveds. <3