I recently read Patrick Rothfuss’ The Slow Regard of Silent Things. Rothfuss is a fantasy author, who has also written some other well-received novels. I liked them well enough, although I find his pacing sometimes interminable. The worlds are interesting and the adventures are fun, but I think my favourite thing is his attention to cute little details. He makes a habit of implying that the reason words (like, real English words) are what they are is because of back stories he is telling in his book. Little things like that are a lot of fun for me.

Anyway, this is a companion book to that ongoing series. It’s a brief story — well, sort of, more like a vignette got entangled with a character study — of a minor character from the other books. It’s a fun little read, and an uncomfortably real, and at times painful, portrait of a person suffering from very serious OCD. Probably. If it were set in the real world, it would be unarguable, but it’s possible that all her wild perceptions about the state of things are valid, because it’s magical, so who knows. It’s easy to read it as OCD, though.

This book sometimes reads very much like Danielewski, especially in the style of Only Revolutions. I have nothing against that, but it was sometimes jarring for me to read a paragraph that reminded me so much of the other book.

Rothfuss advises in the foreword not to read the book if you haven’t read his other books, but I don’t think that’s relevant. You learn so little about Auri in his other books, and so little about anything except her in this one, that it wouldn’t be an issue either way.

I might update this post with a quote or two later, but I do not have the book with me at present.