Description
The first book of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin is a tale of wizards, dragons and terrifying shadows. The island of Gont is a land famous for wizards. Of these, some say the greatest – and surely the greatest voyager – is the man called Sparrowhawk.
As a reckless, awkward boy, he discovered the great power that was in him – with terrifying consequences. Tempted by pride to try spells beyond his means, Sparrowhawk lets loose an evil shadow-beast in his land. Only he can destroy it, and the quest leads him to the farthest corner of Earthsea.
theart –
I cannot fully emphasise my dissatisfaction with this book, I was hoping to find a new series to get stuck into, this definitely was not that. For a specific genre of book which has already been done very many times, I would suggest that you could read another book with a protagonist from an isolated land, adventuring to destroy a dark shadow, alongside a powerful wizard. Lord of the Rings.
You’d think for such a short book (280 pages), it would be action packed and not drawn out. If this book only contained relevant information to the story, or discussed and described the emotions of each character, there would be roughly half the pages there are now (yet still it would be 100 times better).
The character development is abysmal. The narrator goes on and on about things which wont matter, of which the reader will not remember after finishing even just that chapter itself, yet the feelings and emotions of Ged are never once discussed, just the physical actions in which he is performing.
It was impossible to feel sympathetic for any of these characters as a reader. They all seem emotionless, plain, and boring, not to mention the fact that we only see them for 1 chapter at most.
I sincerely hope you feel differently about this book than me for your sake.