A Boredom Of Three Parts (Or: A Fantasy That Suffers From A Failure Of Imagination 
 While it has the requisite page-count of a healthy fantasy epic (any less than 700 and you get kicked out of the club... I'm not sure what club, exactly, but I think it involves cosplay and AD & D), and plenty of pseudo-ethnic R.E.H.-style names meant to effortlessly suggest exotic locales (the main character is called Kvothe), for the most part this is a banal and predictable tale. It involves a not particularly likable hero on a meandering quest of vengeance against a cliched cabal of powerful demigods who killed his parents. He's not in any hurry, though, and neither is the author, who's content to dawdle on the streets of 'Tarbean' with his homeless orphan hero, in just one of the mystifying digressions that fail to arouse interest in the world or character the author is trying to build. As we follow Kvothe into 'The University', the story adopts a grittier and more practical approach to Harry Potter tropes. Kvothes' concerns become pettier and pettier, problems with tuition, and snarky professors, and of course, the rich-kid upperclassman who becomes his sworn enemy. Our hero's friends are all one-dimensional constructs who apparently are interested only in the events of Kvothes' life, a collection of speech patterns and superficial traits that mask their purpose as mirrors to further examine Kvothe -- who is himself a thinly disguised product of the author's own navel-gazing. If you're looking for truly epic Tolkien or Martin-scale world-building, look elsewhere. If you're looking for rousing adventure, unforgettable characters and emotionally wrenching plot twists, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a book that is excruciatingly under-edited, and wish to torture yourself with pretentious prose passages that begin: "It was a silence of three parts...", then by all means, seek out 'The Name of the Wind'.