When a book blows your mind—a review of The Kingkiller Chronicles series by Theresa Gauthier

The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss

Day One: The Name of the Wind (2007)

Day Two: The Wise Man’s Fear (2011)

Day Three: The Doors of Stone (Unreleased)

NOTE: There are two novellas and one short story set in the same world, but I’m not going to touch on those here.

Browsing through a bookstore in 2007, I found the newly released hardcover The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.  The sight of the cover and the blurb on the back convinced me that I had to read it.   Money was tight, though, so I decided to wait for it to come out in paperback.  

When it came out in trade paperback, money was still tight.  I talked myself into waiting for Mass Market Paperback. 

This sounds a lot easier than it was.  I was growing more and more desperate to read it, but it was a series. I knew that I’d want to buy the next books in the same format as the first, and with the way books kept increasing in price, Mass Market Paperback was the most economical way to go.

 It was more than a year after I'd first stumbled across the hardcover that my wait was at last over.  I was well past giddy and approaching delirious with delight.   I read that book so fast that finishing and emerging from that world was something akin to culture shock.  

My book hangover was debilitating.  I couldn’t handle it so I flipped back to page one and read it again.  

When the second book, The Wise Man's Fear, was released, there was no way I was going to be able to wait.  I got lucky, though, and it was on sale, and I had a coupon from Borders. (Alas, poor Borders, I once more so I could be sure I hadn’t forgotten anything important.  I have since bought a signed, hardcover copy of the first book, and a good friend gave me a copy of the 10th Anniversary hardcover. 

        So much for being frugal!

       There are some things you need to know if you’ve never read it.

The plot, details, characters and world are so captivating, so compelling that I cannot find words enough to describe just how good it is.

Perhaps the most mind-blowing thing comes in the first sentence.  Here it is.  Brace yourself.

The Name of the Wind is literally the first book I’ve ever read that had one of those first sentences. 

You know the ones I mean.

Every teacher who has ever taught creative writing on any level, any writer who has ever read or written an article about creative writing, any writer who has ever attended a Writing Group or a Writer’s Conference, has spoken about or heard about or read about The Opening Sentence.  Yes, it’s capitalized.  It’s the Holy Grail of sentences.  People debate about these things.  They throw out examples of them at panel discussions.  It’s the sentence that’s supposed to grab the readers and make them want to keep reading.

Until I read The Name of the Wind I had never read a first sentence that quite fit the bill.  I’ve read a lot of first sentences that seemed, to be honest, rather pedestrian.  They were good sentences, but I would read them over and over and wonder why the author thought they were The Opening Sentence.  When I read The Name of the Wind, I got it.  I understood.  I knew just what that sentence could be and what potential it could claim.

What makes this book The Best Book I’ve Ever Read (Yes, it’s capitalized.) is that every single sentence is like that.  

Every single sentence is that good.

Patrick Rothfuss knows his way around a story.  He knows which words bring the lightning and which are just lightning bugs (Apologies to Mark Twain for mangling his quote.) 

I’ve recommended the series to more than 100 people. I will buy the third book the day of its release—well, I’m sure I’ll pre-order it.

Why?  If you’ve read it, you know why, and, in truth, I feel I should make a confession first.  I don’t really think I ever do the book justice in all the times I’ve described it to people.  My words feel flat,  (like Kvothe’s music felt to him when he broke the string—-) my description, my rush to make sure I make it clear that the depth of the story is far superior to most—this all leaves me feeling I made a hash of it. 

Why do I fail in explaining to anyone what this book is about?  To be honest, I don’t know if I fail in their minds.  They buy the book, read it, and love it.  To my own ears, however, my description is clunky and ill-fitting.  This brilliant piece of genius storytelling comes across like a combination of Harry Potter and Oliver Twist. 

For the record, this book is nothing like either of those books!  Nothing at all.  Not really.  

What sets the series apart is the language.  I found it stunning from the very beginning.  Starting with that first sentence each and every word that followed was perfection.

Until I read The Name of the Wind, though I’d been reading and writing for decades, I had never read anything so powerful in themes and characters, and so gorgeous in language.

I’m not going to tell you what that opening line is.  It’s too good for me to give it away, and telling you would diminish it because you won’t have the next line or the next or the one after that. If you haven’t read this book yet, run out and buy it and its sequel, and even the related novella. You won’t be disappointed.

The Kingkiller Chronicle series follows the life of a boy named Kvothe from his happiest early days through several reversals of fortune.  He goes to a school for magic (that isn’t even remotely like Hogwarts) and though the places he sees and the people he meets are astonishing, the world Rothfuss creates is believable, detailed, and complex.  

    Kvothe's journey is fascinating, and the fact that so much of it is still unknown by the time we finish two thirds of the trilogy is one of the things that makes it so hard to wait for the final volume.  He tells his tale in a chronological progression, so the reader knows where he is as he begins to tell the tale but not how he ended up there.  The gaps are filled in as we progress through the two books, but in slow, delicious, gorgeous detail.

I am in awe of the series and the the world Rothfuss created.  There are a lot of fans of the series who complain that he’s taking too long to write the final volume in the trilogy.  I don’t have that issue.  I’ll wait. I trust him.  He obviously knows what he’s doing.  His talent more than buys him the privilege of tinkering with the book until he’s as satisfied with it.