Bookbanter Column: Get Lost in a Good Fantasy Series, Part 7: “The Kingkiller Chronicles”
The Name of the Wind, the first of the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss, showed itself to the world in 2007.
It was a story that seemed to have every trope and cliché that epic fantasy is expected to have from an old innkeeper named Kvothe telling his tales of yore, to a magician learning the ways of his craft at a magician’s school . . .
. . . And yet there were also facets of the book that made it fascinating and quickly a bestseller, from Kvothe’s abilities and talents as a musician, to some of the amazing characters and friends he has gotten to know, to the magic itself, as they consider themselves arcanists and the magic feels more like a form of science.
The Name of the Wind spent a good long time on the bestseller lists, and earned the epithet: “Harry Potter for Adults.”
Rothfuss took his time with the second book in the trilogy, The Wise Man’s Fear, which was released in 2011, almost a thousand pages long.
But by the end of the book, there still seems too much story to tell.
