The Things I'll Do for Free Booze: A review-ish thing of Name of the Wind

So one day on Facebook, this happened:

And I'll do a lot of things for free booze, so I bought the book on Sunday and finished somewhere between Thursday night and Friday morning.

I drafted this review about 15 times and it just kept devolving into a crappy play-by-play plot synopsis.

So here's the blurb, as found on Goodreads:

Told in Kvothe's own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen. The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature. A high-action story written with a poet's hand, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that will transport readers into the body and mind of a wizard.

Sounds cool, right? 

That's cause it totally is.

When I was standing in the Wife's kitchen browning hamburger for tacos, our friend Aaron said: "You know how they say there are boy movies and girl movies? I kinda feel like this is a boy book." And really, the only people I'd ever heard talk about it have been dudes. So far, I know two other girls that have read it, compared to at least a dozen dudes.. but that's kind of typical of the fantasy genre for me anyway. 

I mean, it's a book by a man, and about a man being all manly and awesome and shit, so if that's your criteria, then yeah, it's kind of a boy book.

But it's a boy book that my delicate feminine sensibilities thought was pretty awesome. It took a bit of a chunk for things to really get rolling, so the beginning was just a bit of a chore to get through.  - But like, a laundry type chore, not a cleaning the grout of the shower tiles with a toothbrush type of chore.  - And while the prose occasionally got a shade purple, the writing was generally pretty fantastic, which was a pleasant deviation from the "great writing but terrible story / great story but awful writing" problem I've run into with a few other fantasy novels. No I'm going to name them right now, fuck off.