A Wizard of Earthsea
1968 • 320 pages
Ratings306
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings306
Average rating3.8
Ged, the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, was called Sparrowhawk in his reckless youth. Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.
Featured Series
6 primary books10 released booksEarthsea Cycle is a 10-book series with 6 primary works first released in 1964 with contributions by Ursula K. Le Guin and Ginger Clark.
Reviews with the most likes.
There was nothing new in this book for me. Themes I've encountered before and the same old uber-powerful hero. On top of it all, everything felt rushed. A bit of a disappointment, this one.
Mixed feelings on this one. I thought the prose was lovely and it's a good story, but I had trouble connecting to anything in this book and it ended up being a bit of a slog to read. The pacing was just off, and the focus consistently on things that didn't really matter in the end, while things that might have been interesting to read about and served the story better were just skipped over. Each new place Ged arrives at is described in beautiful, impressive detail, but it doesn't matter because 4 pages later he's off to somewhere else and we never see those characters or places again, rinse repeat about 20 times... A couple of things kind of come back around but that just makes all the other stuff even more frustrating. The book feels a lot like a summary of events since there's a lot of long time skips (the story spans about 6-7 years in just over 200 pages...) and comparatively few scenes that just focus on moments and characters. Those scenes are great and I found some of them very effective and even touching, but they're scattered inbetween dramatic jumps in time and long descriptions of buildings and landscapes that are nice but to me just take up space that could have been devoted to stuff I'd find more meaningful. Unlike a lot of other reviewers I ended up liking the second half better than the first, but that might also be because I had to spend some time getting into how it's written...
Overall, I liked it, but I don't think this is my thing and I'm hesitant about continuing the series.
A very nice, very familiar book about a boy wizard's coming of age.
This is categorized as YA, but I think most teens would be bored by the slow pace and lack of action. It's a shame because it is a cool book with more philosophical depth than the average sword/sorcery fantasy novel is going to touch.
It was written in 1968 and as such, I can give it a lot of leeway. That's 15 years before David Eddings started his Belgariad, 20 years before Jordan started The Wheel of Time, and over 30 years before J. K. Rowling started the magical adventures of Harry Potter. I'm sure the book and its sequels would feel much more unique if not more successful followers.
It was also made into a moderately awful SyFy TV adaptation.
This is one of the kind of books that people shudder when they think of fantasy. To be fair, it is one of the precursors of this kind of stories.
It is a children's book and offers nothing worthwhile reading, just some standard young magic boy tropes.
Read 0:58 of 7:09 / 14%
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