I haven’t put actual sticky notes on a book since college and this one got four of them by page fifty. Kvothe, a legend hiding out as an innkeeper under a fake name, is telling his own life story to a chronicler over three days, and this book is day one, several hundred pages just to get him through childhood and university, which should not work as a pacing decision and somehow completely does. The story within a story structure means you’re getting the past filtered through a narrator who clearly knows exactly how good his own story is, which makes him an ass, sure, but a compelling one, and I think that’s deliberate, not a flaw the book stumbled into.

The magic system, sympathy, naming, the whole arcanist training sequence, has a rigor to it I wasn’t expecting, and there’s a genuinely funny bit where Kvothe invents a nonsense word on the spot just to see if his scribe’s shorthand can keep up, and it’s the kind of small character beat that tells you more about him than a page of description would. The book also doesn’t shy from how rough his childhood actually gets, and I want to flag that for anyone going in expecting pure whimsy, there’s real darkness braided through the wit.

Where I have to dock a star, and it feels almost unfair to dock it for this, is that the book doesn’t resolve anything, it’s the first third of a trilogy that as of this writing still doesn’t have its third book, over a decade later, and I finished four hundred pages in a single sitting only to hit a wall that isn’t really an ending so much as a pause. That’s not the book’s fault exactly, but it is the reading experience I actually had, invested completely and then left hanging with no idea when the hanging ends.

Four stars. I’d have given it five if I could pretend book three exists.