A Wizard of Earthsea

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.