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A review by davykent
The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
5.0
I wasn't sure if I should take off stars after finishing The Wise Man's Fear. For the most part, I thought the book was amazing. What Rothfuss does well, he does WELL.
However, the time spent in Fae and the aftereffects of it... it was all rather disappointing and obnoxious. At my e-reader settings, TWMF was 3200 pages long. I would estimate there's at least 500 pages of outright drivel that would be at home in a 12-year-old boy's unrefined sexual fantasies. Everything surrounding Felurian was terrible and did not fit the context of who and what Kvothe is. What was doubly unfortunate was that, when Kvothe finally left Fae, the story just kept bringing it back up. Words cannot describe just how immature and poorly crafted the constant "young boy impresses immortal sex goddess" nonsense is. It destroyed a core component of Kvothe's personality, and Rothfuss just didn't let it go for the remainder of the book.
Other people complain about Denna. Not me. I think the Kvothe/Denna dynamic is fantastic. I think Kvothe's treatment of women pre-Felurian was just fine. Afterward? Horrifying. It really truly read like a child's fantasy of sexual conquest, and it warped every plotline after that first initial scene of Kvothe running into Felurian. After that, every plot point somehow, some way, circled back around to Kvothe being a buff sex god and conquering the loins of any woman who crosses his path. It was truly obnoxious to read again and again.
There's no other way I can describe it. It's simply bad writing. It's bad storycraft. It's immature. It's not even true to Kvothe or the world we've been getting immersed in. The only reason I can give this book five stars is because of everything that came before and then the return to the University. Were the book more ordinary, I'd struggle to give this more than 2 stars. Rothfuss needs to drop this "development." It is everything but.
However, the time spent in Fae and the aftereffects of it... it was all rather disappointing and obnoxious. At my e-reader settings, TWMF was 3200 pages long. I would estimate there's at least 500 pages of outright drivel that would be at home in a 12-year-old boy's unrefined sexual fantasies. Everything surrounding Felurian was terrible and did not fit the context of who and what Kvothe is. What was doubly unfortunate was that, when Kvothe finally left Fae, the story just kept bringing it back up. Words cannot describe just how immature and poorly crafted the constant "young boy impresses immortal sex goddess" nonsense is. It destroyed a core component of Kvothe's personality, and Rothfuss just didn't let it go for the remainder of the book.
Other people complain about Denna. Not me. I think the Kvothe/Denna dynamic is fantastic. I think Kvothe's treatment of women pre-Felurian was just fine. Afterward? Horrifying. It really truly read like a child's fantasy of sexual conquest, and it warped every plotline after that first initial scene of Kvothe running into Felurian. After that, every plot point somehow, some way, circled back around to Kvothe being a buff sex god and conquering the loins of any woman who crosses his path. It was truly obnoxious to read again and again.
There's no other way I can describe it. It's simply bad writing. It's bad storycraft. It's immature. It's not even true to Kvothe or the world we've been getting immersed in. The only reason I can give this book five stars is because of everything that came before and then the return to the University. Were the book more ordinary, I'd struggle to give this more than 2 stars. Rothfuss needs to drop this "development." It is everything but.