The Kingkiller Chronicle, Day 1 The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1
mass market paperback, 722 pages
English language
Published May 15, 2008 by DAW Books.
My name is Kvothe.
I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.
You may have heard of me.
So begins a tale unequaled in fantasy literature—the story of a hero told in his own voice. It is a tale of sorrow, a tale of survival, a tale of one man’s search for meaning in his universe, and how that search, and the indomitable will that drove it, gave birth to a legend.
--back cover
I don't usually read much fantasy, but I enjoyed this. The analog to Harry Potter comes from the first book focusing on the main character studies in magic.
The nice thing about this book is that there's very little fancy language. There's no strange names for things. The protagonist is a child prodigy, but this is set up from the very beginning, and it's made expressly clear that cleverness by itself is a double-edged sword that leads to overconfidence and arrogance. The fact that it keeps working for him makes me want to smack him, but as this sentiment is clearly reflected in the book itself, it makes it okay.
Speaking of which. You could call Kvothe a Mary Sue, but that's not quite right. He's not an Everyman, and he certainly has a personality of his own. It's more apropos to say he's what happens when you drop Richard Feynman into a medieval kingdom -- you spend half your time listening to a folky story about a car breaking down, and then two chapters in, you're floating …
The nice thing about this book is that there's very little fancy language. There's no strange names for things. The protagonist is a child prodigy, but this is set up from the very beginning, and it's made expressly clear that cleverness by itself is a double-edged sword that leads to overconfidence and arrogance. The fact that it keeps working for him makes me want to smack him, but as this sentiment is clearly reflected in the book itself, it makes it okay.
Speaking of which. You could call Kvothe a Mary Sue, but that's not quite right. He's not an Everyman, and he certainly has a personality of his own. It's more apropos to say he's what happens when you drop Richard Feynman into a medieval kingdom -- you spend half your time listening to a folky story about a car breaking down, and then two chapters in, you're floating down the river on a raft using a motor cobbled together out of the car's engine and a converter using the solar panels in his pocket calculator and some fresnel lenses he scraped out of the windshield and WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING.
Ahem.
So that's one thing. The other thing is that this book is a tease. A total, no-kidding tease. It will spend three pages telling you about the agony to come, and the hidden wonders of the ages. When you get to the story in question, you realize it's a wonder from his perspective, and a horror of embarrassment and awkwardness. This works especially well with the problems that Kvothe can't outsmart, such as women and his own feelings about them. Kvothe's agony over "the girl" is both painful and obvious to behold -- everyone tells him that she's bad news, and he can't help but agree with them. Yet he's a sentimental idiot with enough brains to berate himself for it.
One thing that the book does absolutely right is not telegraph the awesomeness of Kvothe. He has to earn his stripes. No-one hands down a prophecy and it's clear that while Kvothe is a prodigy, the Arcanum has seen his like before and doesn't treat him like the center of existence. The lack of portentousness is more of a refreshing change that I expected.
Except... well, it's portentous in retrospect. It just is. It's called the Kingkiller Chronicles, forchrissake. It's being related back by the protagonist, who the World in the present time clearly thinks is Just Plain Awesome. There are all sorts of hints dropped of the "unlucky future." And the World related is very clearly "the shire" -- it's bog standard fantasy kingdom land. It's got some wrinkles (people are notably kinder and more generous to the downtrodden than they are in other novels) but you would never mistake this for China Mieville or one of the other master world builders.
Still. It's worth reading, just for the experience of reading someone who knows how to tell a story in a straightforward fashion.
