A Wizard of Earthsea

Rating:
4/5 stars

Re-reading because I don't actually think I understood this book when I was a teenager.

I'm waffling back and forth between 3.5 stars and 4 stars. The book was good overall. It seemed to draw inspiration from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and seemed to also be in the conventional style of the mythical Epic. I could imagine a bard somewhere telling this great story of this boy wizard who met a master, was trained, went to wizarding school, and continued on to greatness.

The book introduces the reader to the fantastical world of Earthsea, where dragons, wizards, witches, and a diverse group of people live together. While the wizards and dragons are immensely powerful, they worry about the equilibrium of the world and what it means to be a good adult.

This book is filled with adventures and hardships, which Le Guin covers superficially and everything sort of just resolves quickly and she moves on to other adventures, which is mostly the reason why this is not a 5-star book for me. The concepts and story is interesting enough, especially being that this was one of the first books to establish the boy-wizard going to wizard school. I enjoyed the philosophical reasonings of the older wizards as they attempted to teach young Ged. I would have liked more depth in character and in plot.


Regardless, this book has its place in the history of culture and the fantasy genre.

Quotes:

“From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”

“But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.”