Review #2 – The Wise Man’s Fear

Published June 29, 2013

I finally got around to reading The Wise Man’s Fear the second book in the Kingkiller Chronicle and I’m glad I did.

I wasn’t a fan of the first one, I thought it was pointless and rambling, with shallow annoying characters. I wasn’t even going to read this one but in the end I decided to give it a shot and I must say I enjoyed this one far more than The Name of the Wind. The story telling was better the recurring characters where more fleshed out and overall it was a better read.

The strong points of The Wiseman’s Fear are its story telling and world building. Patrick Rothfuss does a good job of crafting detailed worlds with some interesting points such as the Adem’s hand language. His story telling will sweep you along in the tale creating a hard to put down book.

It’s not without its problems and if you are looking for strong well developed female characters then you’ll want to look elsewhere. Denna is more interesting and less annoying this time but I still wish that we could see a deeper more developed character for the main love interest. The emotionally damaged escort, with the mysterious past and a patron who beats her, that turns up coincidently wherever Kvothe goes is drawing thin.

Which brings me to the second annoying part of the story building in Patrick Rothfuss’s writing, which is his over use of coincidental event. Almost every key story arc begins with some fortuitous event, which drives the story forward. The main character never does anything for himself everything just falls into his lap.

Most of the characters are also pretty flat and one dimensional. Even after reading two books in this series I can’t tell the difference between Kvothe’s two best friends. They are completely interchangeable and never really add anything.

Also there are a lot of tangents in this novel where a character tells a story which is fine in small doses but it happens so many times that I found myself just skimming those chapters. Once again this book is also overly long it could easily have been a few hundred pages shorter.

Overall if you’re looking for an engaging easy to read story then you’ll enjoy this. If you are looking for a deep rich story then you’ll probably be disappointed.