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A review by wellworn_soles
Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
3.0
I am unsure of how to rate this work. There is quite a lot I like about this book; and unfortunately, there are some places where I felt it was much weaker than its predecessors.
Many of the concepts this book grapples with are extremely interesting; I like Ursula’s decision to look at hero stories, and fantasy, from around its underside to get an entirely new lens. This story is no wide swept, epic story; it is intimate and close, dealing with the farmers, the women, the children - the everyday people of the world. Not everyone can be making history, yet that doesn’t make the pain, fear, or tenderness any less meaningful. In fact, a lot of those emotions resounded with me most strongly here. I feel that Tenar, Ged, and Lebannen are able to exist as fully realized characters in these quite ordinary scenarios, and that says something to their strength as characters. Ursula wrote:
By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics... from the point of view of the people who are not included... Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.
I say all of this because I want it to be clear that I understand Le Guin’s intent, and I like it conceptually. The delivery, however, was hit and miss. Coming fresh off of The Farthest Shore, it sucked that Ged refuses to see Arren. I understood Ged’s trauma, but I was hoping for a resolution; a healing, where Arren could perhaps step fully into kingship before Ged and tell him it is not his magehood that made him the man Arren admired, but rather his kindness, his courage, his sacrifice, etc.
Grief and suffering are central to this story in a violence and banality that aren’t in the previous novels. At times I found that compelling; at others I found it needlessly cruel. I also noticed Le Guin’s tendency to write a story with a solid beginning, a rather slow middle, and a sudden, sweeping ending. I feel it works in many of her books, but here Tehanu’s perspective switch felt too sudden, too small to fully realize her, and thereby a little short of its goal.
I’ll sit on this. Reading through reviews, I seem to see 2 camps: one thinks this book is fantastic for its sharp departure from the center of the first 3 Earthsea books, and the other sees it as a bad book because it does not hold to that center. I find i am somewhere in between, recognizing where the new tone functions to its advantage and where it does not.
Many of the concepts this book grapples with are extremely interesting; I like Ursula’s decision to look at hero stories, and fantasy, from around its underside to get an entirely new lens. This story is no wide swept, epic story; it is intimate and close, dealing with the farmers, the women, the children - the everyday people of the world. Not everyone can be making history, yet that doesn’t make the pain, fear, or tenderness any less meaningful. In fact, a lot of those emotions resounded with me most strongly here. I feel that Tenar, Ged, and Lebannen are able to exist as fully realized characters in these quite ordinary scenarios, and that says something to their strength as characters. Ursula wrote:
By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics... from the point of view of the people who are not included... Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.
I say all of this because I want it to be clear that I understand Le Guin’s intent, and I like it conceptually. The delivery, however, was hit and miss. Coming fresh off of The Farthest Shore, it sucked that Ged refuses to see Arren. I understood Ged’s trauma, but I was hoping for a resolution; a healing, where Arren could perhaps step fully into kingship before Ged and tell him it is not his magehood that made him the man Arren admired, but rather his kindness, his courage, his sacrifice, etc.
Grief and suffering are central to this story in a violence and banality that aren’t in the previous novels. At times I found that compelling; at others I found it needlessly cruel. I also noticed Le Guin’s tendency to write a story with a solid beginning, a rather slow middle, and a sudden, sweeping ending. I feel it works in many of her books, but here Tehanu’s perspective switch felt too sudden, too small to fully realize her, and thereby a little short of its goal.
I’ll sit on this. Reading through reviews, I seem to see 2 camps: one thinks this book is fantastic for its sharp departure from the center of the first 3 Earthsea books, and the other sees it as a bad book because it does not hold to that center. I find i am somewhere in between, recognizing where the new tone functions to its advantage and where it does not.