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37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Either excellent (5) or horrible (1), and that's the problem, January 15, 2000
This story is so hard to rate, because it is excellent - the writing is so much more personal and deep than in the previous books in the trilogy. If you are looking at the technical parts of the story, Tehanu is much better than the beginning stories, and you will go back to the first trilogy, read it and wonder why she couldn't have made the style more like it. It is an good starting point for people who are not accustomed to fantasy, or who like reality to have a place in a fairy tale. The problem that everyone has with this book, in my opinion, is how harsh it is, how human the characters. We who loved the first book will be shocked and dismayed at how frail and... and real our heroes have become. Ged without magic, and utterly without power really hurts to read about. Reading these characters, after having loved who they were, is like having your dreams shattered. The magic is torn brutally out of the fairy tale, and what we have left isn't pleasant. I kept reading the story only because I was certain Le Guin wouldn't let what was once a beloved story for adults and children alike become such a hard, ugly story about life and pain and hope. She just couldn't, but she did. Reading a fantasy in which your heroes are broken and humbled is almost as frightening as watching your parents cry, or seeing what was once a beloved place be torn down to make something like a freeway, black and ugly and full of smog. I kept wishing for the dream that was clear and innocent and beautiful in the first books to come back, but it never did. And though some people might laugh at me for being so childish, I think that the reason we all loved the first books was that it was so much a story that included our fairy tale champions, the characters that we could love both as children and adults, that we could share with our kids. And it gave us these characters without giving the story a predictable, black-and-white cut-and-dry plot. Our heroes made mistakes, and were sometimes foolish and stubborn, which made them all the more treasured and endearing. Tehanu is hard and painful and too real to be connected with the first books. The reason, to me at least, for reading fantasy is not to see life, which is frequently harsh and oppresive and can be cruel with its promises, but to see hope and beauty and dignity which is all too rare in our world. There are enough stories of grief and suffering out there as it is, in stories and out of them. Adults who have never read and loved the first books might like this story. They might see it as a superb example of life, exhausting and petty and cruel at times, being brought into a field of books which normally contains simple, predictable, happy endings of good over bad. And it does, but in my opinion the fairy tale and innocence and fantasy were better left standing, not brought down and dragged in the dust and mire.
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144 of 181 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Sacrificing the magic of Earthsea, November 29, 2000
This book is a betrayal of all that came before. It should never have been written. The first three were works of wonder, touching on universal themes: sublime, compelling, cogent and inspiring. They asked large questions and arrived at honest answers, but they did so gently and gracefully. The quiet unhurried voice is one that this author has honed to perfection. Her world of Earthsea ranks among the very classics, alongside Middle Earth, Narnia and Avalon. Here, everything that made Earthsea so inspiring and evocative is sacrificed to make a point. Le Guin has decided that the fourth book of the series shall be a polemic - an undisguised and prolonged treatise directed at female empowerment and decrying child abuse. Are these worthy moral pursuits? Of course they are. Do they belong in the world of Earthsea? Not even remotely. This book was one of the most excruciating and disappointing reads I have ever undertaken. It's not the writing or the skill - the author's proficiency remains unparalleled - but the desecration of what was magnificent. The skill with which this work is written actually adds to the anguish; we remember what this skill was harnessed to build and cannot help but contrast it to what it is now being used to destroy. Reading this book, one is struck by how fragile a fantasy world like Earthsea really is. Earthsea works because, like all myth, it is founded in a successful illusion. When an author creates such a world, she makes a pact with the reader: "Accept this illusion, and we will journey to a place more vital than any you have known." If the author ever forgets this promise, if she ever turns from the myth to the commonplace, the illusion collapses and the world disintegrates. In this novel, Earthsea suffers precisely such a fate. The mysterious is rendered mundane, fantasy is replaced with reality, imagination is sacrificed to treatise, and the philosophical is surrendered to the prosaic. In the process, Earthsea is reduced to plain old earth. Our imagination is arrested in mid flight and we land with a shattering thump. The third book of the series was a magnificent work. The hero must save Earthsea from the death of its magic. He succeeds, but at great personal cost. In this book, the magic of Earthsea truly dies, but the death comes at the hands of its author and for reasons that are unworthy. This is one of the few books that actively destroys what has gone before. This destruction is so complete that I wish I had never read it and that the memory of Earthsea had been preserved for me unstained.
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33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointing entry that lacks direction, July 1, 2004
Award-winning writer Ursula K. Le Guin finished the Earthsea 'trilogy' in 1972 with the tremendous novel "The Farthest Shore," simply one of the best fantasies ever penned. (The other two books are "A Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Tombs of Atuan.") Eighteen years later, in 1990, Le Guin decided to extend the trilogy to another book, "Tehanu," and has since written two additional books, "Tales from Earthsea" and "The Other Wind." In "Tehanu," she sought to balance out the story of Earthsea by re-visiting Tenar, the girl from "The Tombs of Atuan" and viewing the world through her eyes as an adult coming to terms with the way her life has gone and her relationship to Ged, the hero of the previous three books. Sadly, "Tehanu" is a major disappointment and the poorest of the Earthsea books. The idea sounds interesting: exploring Earthsea from the point of view of a non-sorcerer woman. But Le Guin fails to create an even remotely interesting story around Tenar -- actually, there is hardly any story at all. Tenar stays on the farm, makes a few trips, and takes care of herself and Therru, the strange girl she adopted after Therru was abused and badly burnt. Ged returns abruptly, his magic gone, and the king's men are searching for him. It appears possible that a narrative line will develop from this, but none does. The book plods through unconnected scenes and talky dialogue until it abruptly ends. I'm at a loss to explain Le Guin's narrative failure here. Perhaps, in feeling that she was achieving a great character study, she felt the book would carry itself without a spine of a story, but it doesn't. The problem doesn't lay in what the author says or how she says it -- I'm fine with the female slant to the book -- but how she chooses to frame it. The reader must have a reason to continually turn the page, must want to know how the characters will struggle to overcome their problems and why they must be overcome. Without such a structure, the reader will have a difficult time investing him or herself in what happens, and that is exactly the case here. For an example of Le Guin doing this correctly, read her brilliant novel "The Left Hand of Darkness." She set out to explore an issue of sexuality, and achieved it through the device of adventure and political turmoil. "Tehanu" lacks any cohesive device like that; the book merely 'continues' until it is done. Le Guin's writing style and sense of her characters do keep "Tehanu" from being completely unreadable, but it is slow going. People who have read the first three books should definitely read this because of what it reveals about Tenar and Ged, but they shouldn't go into it expecting the epic grandeur and sweeping power of the first three novels. "Tehanu" remains frustratingly earthbound and static.
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