3 of 5 stars

I didn’t like this book as much as The Name of the Wind, the first book in the Kingkiller chronicle. While this one avoided the awkward beginning of the first in the series, I’m not sure how I feel about the structure of these books. Rothfuss seems to favor stringing together a series of vignettes and stories for hundreds of pages, never really building to a larger conclusion or conflict. Rather, each hundred pages or so feels like its own miniature tale with an arc – and when he moves onto the next, there’s little from the prior arc that carries through. Kvothe’s beef with the Chandrian seems to be the string that ties everything together, but he hasn’t found out anything about them after two books and he feels no closer now than he did before.

The result of this structure is that by book’s end, it feels as if it’s stuttering and limping to a conclusion. Much of the last hundred pages reads like an epilogue – even though it happens to be the last vignette. I truly feel like he could end the book anywhere and it wouldn’t change the tale significantly.

That said, I do enjoy the vignette’s quite a bit. Rothfuss’ dry wit and humor aren’t lost on me, there were several moments where I chuckled aloud, even though I thought the language bordered on too modern in these parts. Even though Kvothe’s adventures are all over the board – training with the Adem, hunting bandits, seducing one of the Fae, Rothfuss manages to create a unique mythology around each character and situation with fantastic depth – it all hangs together very nicely.