As a Classicist, anything that plays around with oral narratives is going to have a soft spot in my heart, and the layers of stories within stories within stories to be found in The Name of the Wind are very compelling. I loved the prose and the storytelling on display here, and I can see why this book was so huge. It's easily one of the most accomplished works of fiction to turn up in the fantasy genre for quite some time. But it is also, at heart, standard epic fantasy. A special young person is orphaned, he is set against a Big Bad, and goes off to learn magic in order to defeat them. Rothfuss hits all the usual beats whilst managing to make them feel fresh, but they are very definitely the usual beats. This isn't N.K. Jemisin territory. 
 So yes, I thoroughly enjoyed, but the book also has some flaws. I'm aware that the following is nitpicking, but given that Rothfuss does so much *right*, and is rightly praised for that, I did find the problems very noticeable: 
 1. The general perfection of the central character 
 Part of the novel's central conceit is that its protagonist is a legendary figure of special genius. I don't object to that per se, and Rothfuss plays with this notion nicely (particularly in having the protagonist tell his own story in the first person), but he also ends up tying himself in knots so that this does not break his story. 
 Kvothe as a protagonist has quite a clear set of goals from roughly a quarter of the way into TNotW. He also has the skill, opportunity and brilliance to accomplish all these goals in about a hundred (entertaining) pages. Of course, Rothfuss can't let it be that easy, so Kvothe's plotline is strewn with obstacles and ill-fated coincidences to slow him down, but those obstacles stand in tension with Kvothe's genius. If Kvothe is wonderful at everything, why does he continue to suffer all these setbacks? The answer is invariably because he was tricked, or because he did something selfless, or because an awful person was working against him. It eventually starts to feel like the old line about job interview answers: "My greatest weakness? I'm just *too* dedicated to my job." 
 To illustrate, Kvothe is admitted to the University at a remarkably young age. However, he can't go and get the information that he requires from the University archives because he was tricked by the antagonist. Of course, Kvothe being brilliant, he could not have been fooled by his antagonist due to simple naivety, he had taken drugs that prevented him from thinking clearly! But he can't have just irresponsibly allowed himself to take drugs, oh no, the drug taking was also part of a different clever scheme, this time to get him out of a punishment. But he can't have done anything *wrong*, naturally, so this was an undeserved punishment that he only received because... 
 You can maintain this sort of tension for short books, but over hundreds of pages it just begins to feel arbitrary and you lose a lot of momentum. 
 2. Trilogy pacing 
 Despite the 600 page length, this is effectively the first act of what is (presumably) going to be a ca. 2,500 page book. You don't, by any means, get a nice discrete chunk of story with a satisfying conclusion or character arc to tie off at the end. There's no real climax, just an action sequence in the forest (which never really feels related to anything else going on), and I was very much left with the feeling that I'd just read the *start* of something. It was a bit unsatisfying for a 600 page read, even if they were 600 enjoyable pages. I had a somewhat similar feeling when I finished reading R. Scot Bakker's "The Darkness That Comes Before", only that book very much concludes on a note of the stage having been set for forthcoming conflict. TNotW, by comparison, just feels like it needed to be split somewhere a third of the way through, and this point seemed as good as any. 
 3. Women (well, Woman) 
 There's basically one female character in the book and she is Holly Golightly. Brilliant, beautiful, poor and reliant on men who buy her presents in order to get by. It's a pitfall of a character to write, and Rothfuss generally avoids falling in, but she remains a bit of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. All the tropes walk straight out of romantic fiction, but they're not deployed as well as they might be. It's hard to escape the feeling that a good chunk of the novel revolves around our protagonist *not* getting together with the girl of his dreams, on account of not having a simple conversation with her. This sort of idiot plotting is the number one difficulty of writing romantic fiction, and the fact that such an accomplished writer as Rothfuss doesn't pull it off, probably goes to show what a difficult genre it can be. 
 4. The names (oh my god, the names) 
 This might be a largely personal thing, but I find it infuriating. Kvothe, Rothfuss tells, us is pronounced almost, but not *quite*, like Quoth. Well just called your main character Quoth then and be done with your borderline unnecessary "KV" digraph. There are quite a few names like that (Josn, Baedn-Bryt), and then a mix of fantasy names (Elodin, Trapis), real world names (Penny, Otto, Nathan), and real world names with unusual spellings (Netalia, Reta, Dennais, Derrik). And then a bit of Hebrew. This has annoyed me ever since reading LOTR and watching Frodo make friends with Sam. Invent names or don't invent names, but please don't go all over the shop...