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A Wizard of Earthsea Book Review

My journey through TIME's Best YA Books of All Time continues with Ursula K. Le Guin's classic A Wizard of Earthsea. As much as I tried to love this book, I am unhappy to report that I couldn't, for reasons that I detail below. However, more than anything, I wish I had read this when I was younger, as I feel like I would have truly enjoyed it more as a kid than as an adult. 

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, and passed away in Portland, Oregon in 2018. She published over sixty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, children's literature, and translation. She was the recipient of a National Book Award, six Hugo and five Nebula awards, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Visit her website at UrsulaKLeGuin.com. You can find more of my reviews of books from TIME's Best YA Books of All Time here. 

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tumultuous tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance. 

The first thing that I couldn't get behind was Le Guin's world building. Unfortunately, a lot of it occurs in very densely packed paragraphs within the first chapter, with many overwhelming details. For me, when the world is built in its entirety so early on, I get sidetracked and disconnected from the story. Since that's how A Wizard of Earthsea is set up, I felt disconnected from the story after the very first chapter. I could recognize the brilliance of the story without fully engaging in it, or wanting to engage in it, which was disappointing to me. I couldn't fully understand the world, or the motivations of the characters because of the world, making for a very unenjoyable read.

Overall, the story is written very densely. For an adventure story, it's written with a lot of prose, and a lot of "and then this happened" narration. I tend to enjoy stories with dialogue, or at least more interactions between characters. There were a few moments in A Wizard of Earthsea where that occurred, but not many to make it as compelling a story for me as it could be. I enjoyed how each chapter was a sort of mini-story, and that we follow the main character through different adventures, but it got very dull very fast when it was hard to understand what was going on or to understand his motivations. Overall, there were some shining moments, but the entire novel did not stand out for me. 

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of brilliant elements in the book. I enjoyed the concept of the name, and a lot of other metaphysical content. I liked that the "villain" is the shadow that Sparrowhawk creates. Like I mentioned, I think it's brilliant that each chapter is a sort of mini-story. There are some wonderful one-liners throughout the text. However, the world building is too overwhelming, and the prose written too densely for it to be consumed enjoyably in my opinion, leading to a rather overall neutral stance on this book in general.

For more of Le Guin, visit her website at UrsulaKLeGuin.com. You can find more of my reviews of books from TIME's Best YA Books of All Time here. 

*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*

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