The Name of the Wind is the first book in the fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.

Plot:
In a small town, a man is attacked by strange, spider-like things and the young village bartender, who is more than he seems to be, goes out to fight them. That’s when he happens upon the Chronicler who recognises the bartender from his previous life as Kvothe. He makes a deal with him: Kvothe will tell him his story and he’ll leave Kvothe’s hidden identity intact.
And then we delve head-first into Kvothe’s life: How he grew up as a travelling performer and started to learn magic from an Arcanist, how he proved to be extraordinarily bright, but also haunted by misfortune. And how he discovers a deadly secret.

The Name of the Wind is an engrossing read (I started to read it exclusively, which is high praise indeed since I usually read two to five books at once), a real page-turner and a well written one at that. Unfortunately that makes its treatment of women even more frustrating. I was torn between closing the book in anger and reading faster.

[Love the cover art.]

Patrick Rothfuss writes in a fluent, engrossing style. The story is perfectly paced and everything just flows.

This is especially hard to pull off since his protagonist and most of the time narrator Kvothe really is an arrogant jerk. He’s extremely talented and brilliant – and he knows it. Yet, instead of getting annoyed by this, it’s actually kind of endearing. Maybe it’s because he’s such an idiot sometimes. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. Don’t know.

Anyway, because the book is so good otherwise, it really got to me that the treatment of women was just so infuriating. First of all, there are like five women in the whole book. [Seriously, I was considering whether this was a kind of postapocalyptic world where almost all the women had been wiped out.]

And then the five women can be neatly divided into two categories: caretaker and damsel in distress, with the love interest (who btw is a walking and talking cliché of a manic pixie dream girl) oscillating between the two categories.

I really hope that the following books in the series change that aspect. Because I really want to read them but I don’t know whether I can sit through another two books where women are treated that way.

Apart from that, I really liked the book and if you don’t pay that much attention to how women are treated in it, it’s really good.