Wizard of Earthsea

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: 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.