Tag Archives: magic

The Name of the Wind

186074Last year, I read an author’s first book about which I had only the best to say. I like this kind of thing, because I get to know about a good author early in the career, and I can keep up over the progression and have thoughtful, chin-stroking opinions and pass on the news to other people to repay all the times that people have done this for me. The thing is, though, it really doesn’t happen very often. So you can imagine my surprise when I’ve got another one, a mere year and a half later.

The Name of the Wind tells the first third of a story that borrows liberally from the tone of Scott Lynch’s books, the voice of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos, and the plot, among many others, of Harry Potter. How many of these are actual influences I cannot guess, of course, but there’s no question that whether influence or simple similarity, Patrick Rothfuss has created a character and a story that both are very much all his own. His world is a fairly standard fantasy landscape in trouble: the roads aren’t safe, war and the rumor of war are on everyone’s mind and tongue, and demons stalk the landscape. But stories and legends abound, very old and recent alike.

A chronicler of such stories is following rumors of one Kvothe[1] the Bloodless, Kvothe Kingkiller. He finds trouble on the road and yes, demons, but he also seems to have found what he is looking for in the guise of a small-town innkeeper. And to even his own surprise, Kvothe agrees to have his story told, if it be told exactly as he tells it, with neither embellishments nor redactions. Of course, who but Kvothe himself is to say how true the story really is, but as it involves magic, demons, dragons, and still more stories of the world underlying his own tale, it makes for a worthy read.

Well, okay, lots of terribly unworthy reads have those things too, but Rothfuss’ premiere work has, as I’ve already implied, an excellent voice telling it. This is the rare work in which the prose and plot are of equally high measure. It also has an entertaining mythology, an engagable and interesting take on magic, and, regardless of Kvothe’s veracity, a great deal of truth to it. The best of the book, though, is Kvothe himself. Unreliable narration has been a pretty sure guarantor of my enjoyment of a book for some time now, but The Name of the Wind is all the more interesting for alternating between Kvothe’s tale and the room in which he tells it, where we can see him through eyes other than his own. He contains in him the heroism he claims, the boundless sense of duty he may not even wholly be aware of, and unplumbed depths of bitter anger that appear whenever the world does not really conform to his liking. Despite how pleasantly entertaining he comes off in the story, an event during its telling that lasted for a mere page told me far more about him than anything he actually said. And this is exactly the kind of thing I love to read about. I suspect it may have to do with my hobbyist interest in psychology? In any event, my only warning and the only complaint I have about the book at all is my lack of clue about when the first sequel will be published.

[1] “Pronounced very nearly the same as Quothe”

Blood Rites

At some point between the last Dresden Files book and this one, I got accidentally spoiled for a piece of character development between Harry Dresden and Thomas Raith, a vampire of the White Court he’s been palling around with lately. (That is, of course, a drastic simplification and barely accurate at that, but so be it.) As such, it’s going to make it tricky for me to dig into the rich thematic ground here that I would and often have plumbed with great abandon for similar situations in other works. And while I could probably still kill this paragraph and start over in a theme-based review without letting you get spoiled by the character elements, these things are mostly more about me than the actual stuff I consumed, as you will have no doubt noticed by now.

After reading five previous novels, what I find that has been the most glaringly absent from the series, the single thing I could point at and say, “Where’s that?”, is porn. Thankfully, Blood Rites has solved this problem to my satisfaction. It’s like, you can only read so many books in a series and remain interested before someone puts some porn in there, am I right? And at long last, there Harry is, surrounded by women in lingerie, watching the cameramen and the boom operators as the director tries to get the shot just right. Because, porn![1] So, um, anyway, Harry is hired to clean up a little bit of entropy that has gotten all over the porn studio.[2] And as the formula dictates, he finds all too rapidly that he’s in something way over his head. Because, there’s the porn and the thing with Thomas, sure, but there’s also more fallout from the war between the wizards and the less pleasant vampires of the Red and Black courts, and at last a little bit of overt sexual tension between Harry and his long time CPD contact, Karrin Murphy.[3]

Plus, bonus awesome evil-detecting puppy!

[1] Oh, hey. You didn’t think I meant, y’know, a gradual devolution of the ongoing plotlines until all that’s left is a series of orgies “held together” by a pregnancy scare? Jesus, that would be a terrible book.
[2] Ew.
[3] I grew up on Moonlighting. Sue me.

Faery Lands Forlorn

Apparently, I waited a while to hit the second book in my current Duncan series. I’ll see about maybe reading the last two closer together. This will be tricky, as there are a couple of gotta read books coming out here soon, plus a couple of other books I want to read in between or whatnot.

Faery Lands Forlorn continues the adventures of Queen Inosolan and Rap the stableboy, now separated by half a continent from each other and from home. Things move fast despite the introduction of a few more races of people with which to fill in the map. In a way, they moved too fast almost. All the events of the first three quarters of the book felt like they should have taken up only a few dozen pages, not a few hundred. And yet there was no trace of things seeming dragged out or focussed on disinteresting side material. It’s a neat trick, and although I wouldn’t want to duplicate it, I wish I knew how he did it. Lots of enjoyable but ultimately empty calories, perhaps.

In the midst of the fast-forward buckle-swashing, sorceress-escaping, and romance-creating, Duncan still found time to flesh out the magic system quite nicely and introduce more powerful enemies while giving old enemies new powers of their own. I think my favorite thing so far is how the word enemy is a misnomer. There are people opposing our heroes’ goals and people assisting them, but there haven’t been any (well, more than one, and I haven’t made up my mind there) truly bad people in the world; it’s all about politics and unobjectionable people who have different goals from each other. The very opposite of run of the mill, and good enough on that merit alone even if it weren’t so rompful.