A classic fantasy novel with an interesting magical system and protagonist. It greatly suffers from being self-congratulatory and portraying only women characters that cater to the male gaze. 

If I could rate this purely on Rothfuss's ability to use the English language to convey ideas, this book would get at least 3 stars. Probably not much more due to his trite and cliche use of fortune-cookie-style omniscient narration that caused an acute case of cringe within the first chapter.

An essay could be written on the failings of this book and other negative reviews have certainly covered a great scope of the problems.

That said, this book was an absolutely miserable slog and I cannot fathom why anyone would wait 10 years for a sequel to this drivel. I deserve the chance to vent my frustration for the suffering I went through trying to find some reason to like this book.

If we're lucky, the author is having a breakdown over finishing the series because he realized he cannot carry on writing fiction that reveals he does not see women as people. My only other hope is that this book was an attempt at highly meta satire about how men view themselves as teenagers and what happens when they struggle to mature that view in adulthood, but I doubt the author was that self-aware. More likely, he wants to show character growth but cannot figure out what that means or how to do it.

Whatever the reason for his lack of motivation to finish the series, I won't be reading any further. Here are my key reasons:

-Fails the Bechdel test. 

-Every woman that does appear (briefly) is a prop for the main character to White Knight himself upon or feel attracted to. Women are only described by their looks. They aren't allowed to have personalities or influence upon the plot.

-Disgusting lines from older male professors to female students, said in a room full of male students. I almost gave up at this point because I could see reviewers largely took commentary on a woman's genitalia being a gate to hell as funny, and not reinforcement of how awful that professor was. Considering we had already reached an understanding that professor was a bag of turds, the harsh misogyny served no purpose. It's no wonder readers took it as a joke in earnest. Poor writing or bad intentions, it did nothing to endear this author to me.

-The main character is not only a self proclaimed genius, but he's an exceptionally gifted musician and arcanist. Really, all this means is he is a Gary Stu and entirely unlikable. And as awful and pretentious as his teenage self is, his adult views are even worse. At one point, he describes his childhood self as having no idea what true grief was after seeing his entire community and parents slaughtered, living in the woods as a wild boy for six months, living on the streets as a beggar, being beaten, starved, and all manner of other horrific atrocities... The only explanation for his adult view on this is that he's a psychopath who cannot comprehend his own pain in relation to his current reality; whereas his current reality has to be the most painful in his mind at all times lest his immediate self lose attention and importance. Either that or this was extremely melodramatic commentary the author thoughtlessly inserted to manufacture anticipation of worse things to come.

-Which leads me to agree with another reviewer's assessment that this is Twilight for men. Except that the men in Twilight at least had influence over the plot and had more personality than the lead character. So in some ways, it's not even as good as Twilight.

-Another similarity it has is with the famous Fanfiction "My Immortal". The melodrama and Gary Stu self insertion opportunities are on the same level.

-Nothing happens. Apparently Rothfuss couldn't afford a good editor to help him sort out what parts of the story were worth telling or not. I'm not sure the insistence on dragging out describing the MC's poverty had the affect it was meant to. Seeing as all he had to do was pick himself up and stop being incredibly depressed as a literal teenage child to end up going to school AND to be paid to attend... that's not how poverty works. So I not only had to be utterly bored by the constant focus on his money troubles, but I was forced to be disgusted by the representation of poverty as well.

-On top of that, him insisting he couldn't tell the story in less than an arbitrary 3 business days, when most of his story is superfluous and unnecessary, was a huge UGH moment. It was so pretentious when he said it but I gave him a chance to prove it right and through his early childhood, it seemed reasonable, but through his school years? I'm convinced Rothfuss thinks, "unable to tidily relate a story," constitutes a character flaw.

(It doesn't. But the MC's massive ego is like ten character flaws in one so I guess we didn't need more... but some self awareness would have been nice, from either the characters or the author.)

-My last point is that none of the side characters are likable or interesting either. Just Bast. But he's not allowed to speak unless the MC grants him permission. I think if he left this book to start a new series with all of the mistreated women in the book, we'd get something actually fun to read.

At least I won't have to wait around hoping for the last book. Instead, this is going on my list of books/authors that indicate someone's book recommendations are to be set aside. It was certainly not for me and if you mention it in the same breath as Lord of the Rings, I'll jump out of the bushes and kick you in your gate to hell. 

I had a rocky start with this book, and it only got better at nearly 300 pages in — but it became a fantastic read, with extremely good world building and exciting twists and turns.

I did not enjoy the darkness of a lot of the early story, and often felt that the main character was being mercilessly beaten and picked on. Perhaps this was the author’s way of balancing him out (he may be a genius and good at everything he does, BUT he has terrible luck and every asshole gets to beat him). It didn’t feel like it balanced his genius to me, it just felt like reading about a 12 year old getting beaten for a hundred pages. Maybe I’m sensitive.

Still, there were ~500 pages of an amazing story, complete with a mysterious library, good friends, and many heroic escapades. A good read. 

Having read this book, I’m conflicted about whether to pick up the second book in the series. This book was both amazing and terrible. 

A verbose high fantasy adventure with intricate descriptive writing. The university of arcanists felt like a more mature Harry Potter story.

This is a very long read and only the first book in the series. The audio book creation version was 29 hours, perfect for listenin  all day at work. 

this book really hasn’t aged well? the writing around poverty & music makes me feel like the author isn’t very familiar with the lived experiences of poor folk & musicians (“if you’ve never been xyz you wouldn’t understand” is said a lot) and it has a very j.j. abrams “mystery box” plot style. it prefers being totally unpredictable to having a flowing plot with foreshadowing and the like. many offhand phrases are repeated over and over again (take a shot every time “times being what they are” is said)

i don’t like school settings and i wasn’t really prepared for us to spend 75% of this book in a school, or to encounter quite so much patriarchy. another review says the protagonist is a mary sue and i very much agree.

there’s lots of different fictional races, which i presume is why people say this cast is diverse, but it’s more like there’s russians & jews, the french & italians, the british, and romani people. as a jew, i always feel off-put by kinds of oppression/microaggressions faced by some groups in here, and by the fact that there’s a ‘money race’ for lack of a better term.

at many points the book was a chore to get through, and i was disappointed by the lack of a clean ending. also, lots of grammar/spelling/math errors in my edition?

overall i won’t be recommending it to anyone myself, but it’s a genre staple and fun to talk about with friends. definitely check the content warnings area before embarking.