I hear that everyone loves this book. It won three awards. It's literary, deconstructs the tropes of heroism, it's an engaging adventure which says deep things, etc. etc
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Yeah, that's pretty much it. The widespread love for it among fantasy fans is baffling to me.
It's kind of like a standard fill-in-the-blanks prequel story, without us really in on what actually interesting and exciting things it's a prequel to.
Yes, that's what it felt like - a prequel which would only be interesting if we'd read the other (nonexistent) book first. Or like the chapter one backstory for the real book. What's the point? (Well, supposedly to deconstruct fantasy tropes, but I didn't see any of that, so the book sure isn't doing it well.)
For me, the words are pretty enough, and the later plot engaging enough, for me to forgive the hackneyed cliches (but then, I actually like a lot of the cliches...)
Still, it isn't a book I would recommend, generally.
I'm not against many of the cliches in general - they can be lots of fun - but if they're all packed together and that's all there is for hundreds of pages before getting to something more engaging, that's just not enough for me. I'm a picky reader :-D
I didn't mind the first one overly - it was hugely clichéd, but the clichés were done well enough that I was prepared to invest - but I was incredibly bored through the second one. I put it down halfway through and didn't pick it up again for a month, and I wished by the end that I'd just abandoned it. The pacing was terrible and the characterisations were shallow (especially Kvothe, who is dull, annoying, and in possession of Mary Sue levels of narrative-endorsed perfection).
I think what bothered me most is that it presents this front of being something much more than what it is and it doesn't pay out on what it's promising, and doesn't have any impression of how badly it's failing at paying out. Show the epic, don't just tell me it's epic and then be 1000 pages of Kvothe wandering around impressing everyone with how wonderful he is! No one seems to notice that all the stuff the story says it is isn't actually there. (Or maybe they're more willing to trust that it eventually will be, or something.)
That's the impression I got - it kept implying it was totally epic and deep, man, deep, and... it wasn't. At least not any of it that I read. And it didn't offer up any subversion (well, I hear there was one bit later in the first book, but that's it apparently?) to compensate for that lack, unless we're supposed to wait until the last page of the last book to have our minds totally blown, and that's just bad writing in my book. I guess if you use pretty words and tell people you're writing Deep Literature, they'll assume you actually are and if they can't see it they must be un-literary philistines or something?
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It's kind of like a standard fill-in-the-blanks prequel story, without us really in on what actually interesting and exciting things it's a prequel to.
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Still, it isn't a book I would recommend, generally.
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I think what bothered me most is that it presents this front of being something much more than what it is and it doesn't pay out on what it's promising, and doesn't have any impression of how badly it's failing at paying out. Show the epic, don't just tell me it's epic and then be 1000 pages of Kvothe wandering around impressing everyone with how wonderful he is! No one seems to notice that all the stuff the story says it is isn't actually there. (Or maybe they're more willing to trust that it eventually will be, or something.)
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