The first volume of Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles was an entertaining action adventure story. The writing is a cut (or several) above the typical fantasy fare about magic and dragons and damsels in distress. In fact, it has all of these, but it manages to put a slightly ironic distance between itself and the worn out tropes of the genre by using a frame story -- the main character relates his own autobiography to a scribe in grandiose and yet self-deprecating fashion. It also sets itself apart by treating magic as if it were a fully explainable science. Most of volume 1 is set in The University, the sole institution of higher learning in a superstitious medieval world. There they teach various arcane disciplines like naming and alchemy and such. This gives Rothfuss the chance to elaborate on how magic and dragons actually work instead of settling for the usual mysteriousness of the genre.
All that said, it's a bit long-winded as action adventure books go, and doesn't really seem to have any of the novel ideas I love in science fiction or fantasy. So I don't think I'm going to read volume 2.
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