The SF Site Featured Review: The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed

The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed

Pat Rothfuss, illustrated by Nate Taylor

Subterranean Press, 72 pages

Patrick Rothfuss
Patrick Rothfuss was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1973. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1999 with a B.A. in English, returning two years later to teach. After completing an extremely long fantasy novel called The Song of Flame and Thunder, Rothfuss submitted it to several publishing companies, but it was rejected. Finally, DAW Books bought it and split it into a three-volume series entitled The Kingkiller Chronicle, the first installment of which, The Name of the Wind, was published in March 2007.

Patrick Rothfuss Website
ISFDB Bibliography
SF Site Review: The Name of the Wind
SF Site Interview: A Conversation With Patrick Rothfuss

A review by John Enzinas

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This book is only 72 pages long and each page has only a couple of sentences on it. The rest of the page is filled with precise and fanciful illustrations by Nate Taylor giving us the details of the action described by Pat Rothfuss's words. Given this limited amount of content, it's hard to know how much to tell you about this book without giving anything away.

The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed is explicitly not a children's book, although it is written like one with the short descriptive sentences and lots of pictures. It's written for someone who has read a lot of not-so-great children's books and needs something like a mental sorbet to cleanse the pallet and prepare themselves for one more reading of Hamster Hewey and the Gooey Kablooie.

Once you've made it to the end, past the happy ending and the scary ending all the way to the real ending, you can go back to the beginning and find all of the little clues that Mr. Taylor left for you. If you are really lucky, you might even have a child you can read this to instead of Hamster Hewey.

John Enzinas reads frequently and passionately. In his spare time he plays with swords.