Book Title: A Wizard of Earthsea
Author: Ursula Le Guin
Series: Earthsea Cycle #1
Date Started: February 11th 2019
Date Completed: February 19th 2019
Genres: Adventure, Fantasy
Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Four Stars
Final Rating:
Review:
Ursula Le Guin is the mother of modern fantasy, twin/partner/shadow only to Tolkien. And so, being a fantasy-lover, I am ashamed to say I had never read any of her work before this. My exposure had been my mother's recommendation and the Ghibli film by Goro Miyzaki. Of course, background knowledge of 60s/70s fantasy literature and a healthy appetite for mythology comes in handy, but none of which you need to enjoy what has to be one of the greatest and most underrated fantasy novels of all time.
The obvious thing to point out is the old-timey feel. Maybe the grammar and sentence structure might throw a few people off, to begin with, but I'd recommend carrying on anyway. I found it kind of nostalgic for a fantasy reader in her twenties, though I liked it. I think a great deal of the magic is its poetic and deeply atmospheric tone. The prose makes you feel like you're living with these people, hearing their dialect as if it were a far off land, but somewhere that you are travelling along with the hero himself.
We follow Sparrowhawk, a young mage who goes from being a goatherd to a wandering apprentice; calling forth a demon from the afterworld to defeating a dragon, to befriending animals; going to wizard school, to sailing a ship to... The point is, this book has everything. Like most old-fashioned epic fantasy, it works in an episodic structure akin to The Odyssey or Narnia. In what is actually a pretty small book, we are guided through this expansive world with just enough exploration to sate our curiosity, but not too much to overwhelm. It's a love letter to a fictional land as much as it is its own story.
For modern readers, I'd call it the mid-point between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. It has the epicness of Tolkien; the vast, fathomless landscapes and cultures, driven by nature and magic. But it's the whimsy, the people, the universal relationships that you stay for. I, personally, think it's far more accessible than Middle Earth, wonderful as it may be. And reading Le Guin's foreword and afterword I can tell in the later books there are going to be some powerful women, so it's a shame these books don't get as much recognition as they probably deserve.
I wish I'd read this as a child because I would've been entirely lost inside this world. Even as an adult it sucked me in, but I remember how stories like this used to utterly consume me for days on end where I wouldn't be able to put the book down. A skill perhaps useful for reading this rather extensive collection of stories that I hope to continue soon.
