RSSThe Name of the Wind and Mistborn
Jul 24
Last week, I finished reading The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
I enjoyed it, although I had several issues with it. It read much more like a setup than a standalone story. The climax felt tacked on and didn’t really resolve much. The hero has a nigh endless list of virtues, and his flaws tend to be of the flaws-that-are-actually-strengths variety (he doesn’t actually say “I can’t adequately conceal how awesome I am, which insecure people find threatening” but you can tell he’s thinking it). The love interest is kind of a head-scratcher for me, too — she doesn’t really do anything that makes her appealing as a character, but the protagonist constantly drools over her, and the story-in-a-story structure is used to say that she’s literally indescribable. Despite those complaints, I did like the book. I think that, since I’m working on my own writing, I am becoming hypercritical. In some ways that’s making me feel better about my own work — if he can get published with “obvious” problems like these, maybe I have a shot, too!Earlier today, I finished Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.
I liked it a lot, although my hypercritical mind picked up on a few issues here, too. There are two primary viewpoint characters through the first part of the book, but I occasionally felt like the switches from one to another weren’t crisp enough — since both characters tend to interact a lot in the same locations you don’t have as many cues that something has changed, so on more than one occasion I didn’t pick up on the viewpoint shift until a few paragraphs into a new section, which I found jarring. He also turned a side character into a minor viewpoint character more than three quarters of the way into the book, which struck me as odd — I think I would have preferred to either have snippets of this viewpoint throughout or to never have this viewpoint at all, just to have a more consistent way to interact with the character as a reader. I also got lost and disoriented in a few of the action scenes because they focused heavily on the use of magical powers that don’t have strong frames of reference in normal human experience. In some ways they felt like modern quick-cut action movie scenes that neglect establishing shots — unless you know exactly what’s going on it’s easy to get lost. I also didn’t get a strong sense of geography in the story (there’s “the city” and “the mansion in the next town over”) but I found that reassuring rather than offputting since that’s one of the things I’m most worried about in my own writing, and if epic fantasy superstar Brandon Sanderson can get away with it… Despite my nit-picking I did enjoy Mistborn and I’ve already started reading the second book in the series.