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| The Wise Man’s Fear |
I’ve been looking forward to Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear ever since I finished the first book in this supposed trilogy. The first book, The Name of the Wind, was so fresh, and the main character so engaging, that I wanted to know more about this book’s world. While I do get to know a bit more about the world, The Wise Man’s Fear is not as tightly constructed as the first book. As I explained to a fellow reader last week, The Wise Man’s Fear is not so much the continued adventures of Kvothe as it is the continuing adventures.
In the first book, Kvothe claims that it will take three days to tell his life’s story. This book picks up on day two. And, in the first book, the plot followed a rough arc as Kvothe journeyed from traveling actor to street child to university student, all the while searching for the people who killed his family. That search almost disappears in this book as Kvothe travels around his world having, essentially, adventures. The story leaps from episode to episode, with a few call backs to the first book. As I read, I kept waiting for more to be revealed about Kvothe’s enemies–but there wasn’t much. Reading this book seemed, at times, like reading a series of short stories. The only thing that connected them was chronology.
There were other missteps in this book. Kvothe, who I very much sympathized with as I read the first book, wavers between stone-cold killer and the seventeen year old boy that he actually is. Characters should grow and develop over the course of a book, granted, but its too much of a leap to see Kvothe slaughter a pack of mercenaries or traveling bandits with every appearance of bloodlust and then a few pages later to move on. Kvothe’s emotional and moral compasses jerk around too quickly for belief, at times. I had to wonder if it was some of Rothfuss’s inexperience as a writer showing through.
It is a shame that this book didn’t shine as much as its precursor. I have hopes that the next book will be better. I sincerely hope that it will return to the original plot arc. It just seems that there’s so much left of the story that it can’t be wrapped up in one more book. Not that I wouldn’t mind another book about Kvothe; I just hope that future books are more tightly (and believably) written.