This is one of those books that confounded my expectations, and left me with real uncertainty when asked to rate it out of 5 for Amazon and GoodReads. At the time of writing, I have left no score.
On the whole, the book is well-written and becomes a very easy and pleasant read. Its fantasy world is a curious mix of medieval technology and magic, and has been thought through with an astonishing level of detail for not just the exciting stuff, but also cultures, religion, drugs, plant life, animals and history too. The lead character is appealing, and I feel sufficiently flawed.
Ultimately though, and there’s no getting away from it, this is a story about a boy wizard in a wizarding school. It is dressed up in a delightfully mysterious setting, where an innkeeper who’s clearly hiding something, not least because he knows a lot more about the demonic creatures roaming the nearby forests than the locals, starts telling his story to a passing scribe. Tales of an idyllic childhood where he learns all kinds of skills as part of a band of travelling entertainers and befriending a tinker/magician, blend into different lessons living on the streets of the big city, before moving to “The University” and chums, enemies, japes, dealing with girls, and so on. It then heads into the back of beyond to a more cinematic finish.
There is so much of The Name of the Wind that I like, and believe is done well. I’d be delighted to spend more time with the varieties of magic, life on the nasty big city or on the road, or in the initial setting of demon-infested village life with flecks of heroic past-lives. I just don’t want to hear bad-luck stories of an extraordinarily talented young man that don’t really live up to the world that’s been created.
It’s amusing that this was the first fiction book to follow Rivers of London, and perhaps I wasn’t ready for more wizarding lessons in spite of this being a considerably better book, although perhaps less entertaining. Whereas I decided Rivers of London was a low 4-star book because it exceeded my expectations, I feel The Name of the Wind is a high 3-star book because it didn’t live up to them. I feel tempted to get the next book and hope to feel vindicated by choosing to read books under the name “the Kingkiller Chronicles”, I’m currently inclined to leave it for a while and see how the book settles on me.
