Rating: 
Summary: Harry Potter??? Who's that? Ged of Ten Alders!!!
Review: Okay, so maybe I haven't REALLY forgotten Harry Potter-in fact, I'm a HUGE fan of the Potter Books (I even did My English II research Paper on it), but I just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" and I have to say that I absolutely loved this book.
It really made me angry that nobody ever told me this book existed. I was born in 1981 and have since been forced by my crummy education to read (if you call it that) books that lack...well, imagination. I wish there was somebody during my youth that would have told me about Ged and the Island of Roke, maybe then I would have started reading YEARS earlier.
This book speaks for everything I stand for in my love for Fantasy-yes, I'm a dork, but a proud one I am-but also it speaks for my stance on what young people should be allowed to read. Young people should be exposed to books such as this so they can first and foremost establish a LOVE for reading. I promise you, this book can do that.
I don't know if writers like Christopher Paolini read the Earthsea books, but you can definitely see how Ursula K. Le Guin inspired other popular writers of Fantasy. It could be considered part of the High Fantasy Genre, but then again, it lacks the stuffiness of High Fantasy-but that's a good thing.
But what really made me love this book from the very beginning is the character Ged. I don't know, I kind of saw a lot of myself in him. Ged was a dreamer, and wouldn't settle for mediocrity. But he was also a showoff, which got him into a LOT of trouble.
Most of all, this book will leave you with a good feeling-I can't explain the feeling, but it is good. Maybe it's the feeling of actually "reaching the last pages of the book without getting sick of it" that always gets me, or maybe it's something bigger. Whatever it is, "A Wizard of Earthsea" is a book you can read again and again, and since it can be bought in paperback, is more than a fair investment. If you don't like it you can probably find somebody that will, and you would have only spent $8.00, and it will make a great gift.
To end this review I just want to repeat that I REALLY wish somebody had introduced this book to me when I was young-or younger, at least. Okay, maybe this will sound all "After School Special" like, but the Gift of Reading is not only a Priceless Gift because it enhances the mind, but because when you read about characters like Ged, you are inspired to be something more, inspired to be bigger than yourself. In my opinion, heroes make the best role models, and Ged of Ten Alders is NO exception.
Rating: 
Summary: There's More to Earthsea than the Trilogy
Review: Reading the Earthsea Trilogy was one of the highlights of my childhood. Discovering that it had become the Earthsea Quartet and now Quintet is one of the highlights of life today. Why it's still being featured as a trilogy when there are two further books to be read, I don't understand!Le Guin is the daughter of anthropologists and through all her fiction there is a deep, ingrained understanding of societies work and how they are built and evolve (or disintegrate). It's very interesting to see how her own interests have matured and deepened over the decades of writing this series - the latest Earthsea Title - The Other Wind is a fabulous rendition of concerns about gender/sexism/prejudice and the very nature of things. BUT that's for the grown ups, what really matters is that underneath all her incisive intelligence Ursula Le Guin tells a gripping, exciting and devastating series of stories that come at one in a rush of tight telling and delicately realised plots. She is simply one of the greatest writers for older children - or anyone! So start with the Wizard himself, then read on and on....
Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly, a little bit frightening
Review: Sparrowhawk is a prideful boy, touchy, easily humiliated. He also had great potential powers to be a wizard. Combine all those things, and you've got trouble. This is a book about magic, with a light, magical touch, but it's also got its dark side--in this case, a boy who too soon messes with things that he shouldn't mess with, who ends up scarred and changed forever because of what he's done, and all because of his pride. This is a cautionary tale about what happens when hubris meets a very powerful magic. Out of all of Le Guin's novels, I found this one the best.
Rating:
Summary: Wow!!
Review: This book was so incredibly awsome I cannot even describe! To see Sparrowhawk grow from a young boy who entranced goats, to a man who mastered his own inner deamons was a great journey. This book is full of magic and mystery more than you could imagine. The thought of a gibbeth coming after me terrified me to my very soul!! I would seriously recommend this book to anyone who liked the LOTR and our magical friend Harry Potter...
Oh, and I would reccomend reading the books before watching the Sci-Fi series "Earthsea."....also very good!
BW~
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is a different fantasy story than what I am used to. Fantasy often involves page after page of trolls, dwarfs, elves and wizards with strange names locked in epic wars and quests. While that formula is all fine and good, by keeping action to a minimum and philosophy to a maximum, Ursula K. le Guin departs from it somewhat in the story "A Wizard of Earthsea." The story involves the early exploits of the powerful archmage Ged, when he was a young man named Sparrowhawk. At a young age he is living with an abusive guardian, when he discovers he has magical powers. He then leaves this abusive person and goes off to wizard school to be learned in the arts of magery (sound familiar Potter fans?). There he befriends a fellow prentice named Vetch, and enters into a rivalry with another wizard prentice by the name of Jasper. This rivalry results in the release of a dark, evil shadow from the realm of "unlife" during a "wizard duel," when Ged casts a spell beyond his control. Ged then spends the length of the book first running from the shadow, which seeks to posses him, and then pursuing the shadow, seeking to destroy it, trying to undo the evil he had begun in a moment of stupid pride. I have often felt that a good fantasy formula is pitting a fallible character(s) against the deeds of his errant actions. This formula is used in the Narnia books and also in Tolkien's stories. It is repeated in this book and works very well. While the obvious lack of action (although when there is action it happens with some amount of violence) may alienate traditional fantasy readers, the philosophy of the book and the examination of the balances between good and evil should appeal to adults and older children alike. The inclusion of maps and the well developed magic system, and the unique emphasis on names, also contributes to the plausibility of the book and gives it the characteristic feel of a good fantasy story. An excellent, highly-recommended book.
Rating:
Summary: One of the all-time great fantasy novels
Review: Though obviously written for adolescents, this is a beautifully crafted story that should appeal to all thoughtful readers. In prose that is spare yet visually evocative and resonant with meaning, LeGuin creates an exterior journey of adventure that is also a deep personal journey toward maturity, with all the pain and loss, the failures and successes, and ultimate balance that such a journey involves. Her note-perfect narrative voice enhances the archetypal nature of Ged's quest for purpose and values. His journey takes place in a world as diverse as our own, for the richly envisioned archipelago of Earthsea contains different languages, remote islands and trade centers, rural folk and city sophisticates, cold lands and hot lands, wealth and poverty. Along with several powerful main characters, the novel has many nicely observed minor players and some charming animals, such as a little dragon the length of a girl's hand that lives in oak trees and eats wasps, worms, and birds' eggs. And of course there is the Shadow that Ged accidentally releases in a dangerous ritual, spurred by his own ambition, that goes terribly wrong. Magic appears only when needed, and the descriptions of it are very effective, such as when Ged creates fog to confuse invading warriors or transforms himself into the sparrowhawk that is his namesake in order to make a long journey fast. Beyond its exciting adventure and the theme of self-discovery, the novel is also about how language creates reality, for magic is controlled by language, and language dictates how individuals perceive themselves and the world around them. This is the best -- the purest -- of the four books in the tetralogy, which is saying a lot because all of them are good. Like each of the four, it is a complete story that doesn't depend on the others. My personal favorite among the other three is The Farthest Shore, in which an older Ged takes on a younger version of himself as a kind of apprentice.
Rating:
Summary: great standalone book, start of a very good series
Review: With the recent Sci- Fi Channel miniseries, there is bound to be renewed interest in LeGuin's classic first book in her Earthsea series, as there should be. This remains a classic fantasy for good reason. The world within which the characters move is fully developed, having a sense of past, present and future as well as a sense of a larger "there there", as opposed to some fantasies that feel like a Hollywood stage set, as if nothing exists beyond the narrow social/geographical worlds the characters move through. Such is not the case with Earthsea. One feels it is real from the start and the ensuing books in the series only deepen that feeling with regard to its social and political structures, its people, its mythic past.
The characters are equally strong, especially Ged, the young boy who grows to adulthood in true coming-of-age fashion--through pain, loss, self-destruction, and eventual slow growth of wisdom. The depiction of his younger years as he first learns of his wizardly power and potential, apprentices to a single wizard then rejects that slow, dull path in order to attend the more exciting wizardry school (do not think Harry Potter here, style, tone, and environment are quite different) is right on. He is impatient, cocky, self-sure, quick to anger, impulsive, moody. In short, he is an adolescent. As such he has no time for the slow pace of his masters, for their constant warnings about the "balance" (the universe is in constant equilibrium and one change someplace effects another change, for good or ill, somewhere else) and its restrictions on use of power. The idea of the balance is the more you know, the less likely you are to act. Ged, in impetuous and realistic fashion sees it as the more you know, the more you can act.
As one might expect, his blithe self-confidence sets him up for a major fall, as he accidentally opens a portal, allowing an unknown "shadow" to enter the world. Roughly the first half of the book leads up to this event, the second half follows what happens afterward, as Ged is hunted by the evil he has let into the world, an evil that can cause great harm unless he does something about it. Along the way, he slowly grows in wisdom (the steps toward adulthood are gradual but nicely marked), helped along by his former tutor whom he rejected for his dull passivity and his closest friend from the wizard's school at Roke, Vetch.
The end, without giving details away, is simply perfect in its resolution, in its tone, and in its complexity. Don't expect simplistic happy ending or heroic battles against overwhelming odds; this is a personal journey, a personal victory, though it has larger repercussions.
The book succeeds in pretty much all it does. Its world creation is rich and full and three-dimensional. Its characters are sharply detailed, realistic, complex beings. Its plot exciting, its language vivid (sometimes classified as young adult--I'm not sure why--it does not talk down to a perceived younger audience, in terms of complexity of language or philosophy). And in the best test of a good book, it leaves the reader wanting much more; luckily LeGuin provides with several more books in the series. Very highly recommended.
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