Back in elementary school and high school1 I was a huge high fantasy fan. Somehow, though, I never got around to Earthsea, which I’ve since learned is a genre staple!
The story follows Ged as he develops his magic into becoming a great wizard. He spends a lot of time early on doing whatever he can to prove he’s the best, to the point where he causes problems and gets one of his teachers killed. After this point, a dark shadow follows him that seeks to possess him and he must either evade it for the rest of his life or confront it and risk losing himself to it.
It’s interesting to see the contrast here to a lot of the books I’ve been reading lately. The perspective is not in Ged’s head, but in third omniscient and separated from the action. It’s interesting because you get to see his actions without the justification and need to make him sympathetic. His actions speak to his character, and he is a prideful kid who is making mistakes and doing things for bad reasons. If this were told from his perspective I would have hated it, but the separation made it interesting to watch his character learn and grow.
Nostalgic is how I’d describe the reading experience. It reads very much like the fantasy books I’ve grown up with, but with a focus on a single character learning, changing, and growing as he explores an interesting world. Overall, I really liked it though it really does read a lot different than anything I’ve read in the past couple years.
- There was no middle school here. I thought that was a fiction-only thing for a very long time. [↩]