The Wise Man's Fear

Man, I loved this book.

The Name of the Wind was good, and when I read it a year ago it left me with fond memories. So when I grabbed The Wise Man's Fear from the library, I was pretty excited. I put off reading it though due to its size.

At 1000 pages even this book is kind of intimidating. Yes, we read SF/F, and plenty of books have this page length, but having come off of much shorter words I wasn't ready to dive back into a massive tome.

I'm glad I got to it.

The Wise Man's Fear continues the story of Kvothe telling the story of himself. (Does that make sense?) While whatever caused him to ditch the hero's life and become a simple innkeeper isn't revealed, this book does answer some questions about the other adventures he hinted at in the first book. He continues at the University, travels the world, journeys to the land of Fae, hangs out with a bunch of red dressed ninjas, and suddenly becomes rich.

There's a lot of nods to the first book, and there's a real sense of cohesion throughout the book. It's fun to read about Kvothe's little pranks, but it's impressive to see how relevant they all are in the larger scheme of the book.

Places were slow but you can't expect less in a book this long. In all, it's one interesting adventure after another, and it filled me with a certain melancholoy, knowing how it would all end.

If you read The Name of the Wind, you'll enjoy this book.