Buying Options
Digital List Price: | $9.99 |
Kindle Price: | $8.69 Save $1.30 (13%) |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

![Powers (Annals of the Western Shore Book 3) by [Ursula K. Le Guin]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51I-LpH02IL._SY346_.jpg)
Powers (Annals of the Western Shore Book 3) Kindle Edition
Ursula K. Le Guin (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Price | New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial |
Paperback, Import
"Please retry" | $10.60 | $13.81 |
Brought up in comfort as a house slave for a great family, young Gavir can recall the page of a book after seeing it once. Sometimes he even “remembers” things that are going to happen in the future—a power Gav cannot explain or control, and one that his beloved older sister wisely advises him to keep secret. But when tragedy destroys his trust in all he has ever known, he flees in blind grief, setting off on a treacherous journey towards a goal he does not understand. Is Gav seeking freedom? Or his own people? Then there is the greatest mystery of all: the true use of his powers.
“This follow-up to Gifts and Voices may be the series’ best installment,” raved Booklist, while the Toronto Star praised Le Guin for “her facility in world-making and her interest in human nature” in “a good, long trek of a fantasy.”
Shortlisted for a Locus Award, the third book of the Annals of the Western Shore is an epic story of survival and self-discovery that brings its hero home at last to a place where he has never been before.
- Reading age9 - 12 years
- LanguageEnglish
- Grade level5 - 7
- Lexile measure950L
- PublisherHMH Books for Young Readers
- Publication dateApril 6, 2009
- ISBN-13978-0152066741
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
“With compelling themes about the soul-crushing effects of slavery, and a journey plotline that showcases Le Guin’s gift for creating a convincing array of cultures, this follow-up to Gifts and Voices may be the series’ best installment.” —Booklist (starred)
About the Author
From School Library Journal
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Book Description
978-0-15-205770-1 $17.00 --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
“Don’t talk about it,” Sallo tells me.
“But what if it’s going to happen? Like when I saw the snow?”
“That’s why not to talk about it.”
My sister puts her arm around me and rocks us sideways, left and right, as we sit on the schoolroom bench. The warmth and the hug and the rocking ease my mind and I rock back against Sallo, bumping her a little. But I can’t keep from remembering what I saw, the dreadful excitement of it, and pretty soon I burst out, “But I ought to tell them! It was an invasion! They could warn the soldiers to be ready!”
“And they’d say—when?”
That stumps me. “Well, just ready.”
“But what if it doesn’t happen for a long time? They’d be angry at you for giving a false alarm. And then if an army did invade the city, they’d want to know how you knew.”
“I’d tell them I remembered it!”
“No,” Sallo says. “Don’t ever tell them about remembering the way you do. They’ll say you have a power. And they don’t like people to have powers.”
“But I don’t! Just sometimes I remember things that are going to happen!”
“I know. But Gavir, listen, truly, you mustn’t talk about it to anybody. Not anybody but me.”
When Sallo says my name in her soft voice, when she says, “Listen, truly,” I do truly listen to her. Even though I argue.
“Not even Tib?”
“Not even Tib.” Her round, brown face and dark eyes are quiet and serious.
“Why?”
“Because only you and I are Marsh people.”
“So was Gammy!”
“It was Gammy that told me what I’m telling you. That Marsh people have powers, and the city people are afraid of them. So we never talk about anything we can do that they can’t. It would be dangerous. Really dangerous. Promise, Gav.”
She puts up her hand, palm out. I fit my grubby paw against it to make the vow. “I promise,” I say as she says, “I hear.”
In her other hand she’s holding the little Ennu-Mé she wears on a cord around her neck.
She kisses the top of my head and then bumps me so hard I nearly fall off the end of the bench. But I won’t laugh; I’m so full of what I remembered, it was so awful and so frightening, I want to talk about it, to tell everybody, to say, “Look out, look out! Soldiers are coming, enemies, with a green flag, setting the city on fire!” I sit swinging my legs, sullen and mournful.
“Tell me about it again,” Sallo says. “Tell all the bits you left out.”
That’s what I need. And I tell her again my memory of the soldiers coming up the street.
Sometimes what I remember has a secret feeling about it, as if it belongs to me, like a gift that I can keep and take out and look at when I’m by myself, like the eagle feather Yaven-dí gave me. The first thing I ever remembered, the place with the reeds and the water, is like that. I’ve never told anybody about it, not even Sallo. There’s nothing to tell; just the silvery-blue water, and reeds in the wind, and sunlight, and a blue hill way off. Lately I have a new remembering: the man in the high room in shadows who turns around and says my name. I haven’t told anybody that. I don’t need to.
But there’s the other kind of remembering, or seeing, or whatever it is, like when I remembered seeing the Father come home from Pagadi, and his horse was lame; only he hadn’t come home yet and didn’t until next summer, and then he came just as I remembered, on the lame horse. And once I remembered all the streets of the city turning white, and the roofs turning white, and the air full of tiny white birds all whirling and flying downward. I wanted to tell everybody about that, it was so amazing, and I did. Most of them didn’t listen. I was only four or five then. But it snowed, later that winter. Everybody ran outside to see the snowfall, a thing that happens in Etra maybe once in a hundred years, so that we children didn’t even know what it was called. Gammy asked me, “Is this what you saw? Was it like this?” And I told her and all of them it was just what I’d seen, and she and Tib and Sallo believed me. That must have been when Gammy told Sallo what Sallo had just told me, not to talk about things I remembered that way. Gammy was old and sick then, and she died in the spring after the snowfall.
Since then I’d only had the secret rememberings, until this morning.
I was by myself early in the morning, sweeping the hall outside the nursery rooms, when I began remembering. At first I just remembered looking down a city street and seeing fire leap up from a house roof and hearing shouts. The shouts got louder, and I recognised Long Street, running north from the square behind the Forefathers’ Shrine. At the far end of the street smoke was billowing out in big greasy clouds with red flames inside them. People were running past me, all over the square, women and men, most of them running towards the Senate Square, shouting and calling out, but city guards ran by in the other direction with their swords drawn. Then I could see soldiers at the far end of Long Street under a green banner; they had long lances, and the ones on horseback had swords. The guards met with them, and there was deep shouting, and ringing and clashing like a smithy, and the whole crowd of men, a great writhing knot of armor and helmets and bare arms and swords, came closer and closer. A horse broke from it, galloping up the street straight at me, riderless, lathered with white sweat streaked red, blood running from where its eye should be. The horse was screaming. I dodged back from it. And then I was in the hall with a broom in my hand, remembering it. I was still terrified. It was so clear I couldn’t forget it at all. I kept seeing it again, and seeing more. I had to tell somebody.
So when Sallo and I went to get the schoolroom ready and were there alone, I told her. And now I told her all over again, and telling it made me remember it again, and I could see and tell it better. Sallo listened intently and shivered when I described the horse.
“What kind of helmets did they have?”
I looked at the memory of the men fighting in the street.
“Black, mostly. One of them had a black crest, like a horse’s tail.”
“Do you think they were from Osc?”
“They didn’t have those long wood shields like the Oscan captives in the parade. It was like all their armor was metal—bronze or iron—it made this huge clanging sound when they were fighting with the guards with swords. I think they came from Morva.”
“Who came from Morva, Gav?” said a pleasant voice behind us, and we both jumped like puppets on strings. It was Yaven. Intent on my story, neither of us had heard him, and we had no idea how long he’d been listening. We reverenced him quickly and Sallo said, “Gav was telling me one of his stories, Yaven-dí.”
“Sounds like a good one,” Yaven said. “Troops from Morva would march with a black-and-white banner, though.”
“Who has green?” I asked.
“Casicar.” He sat down on the front bench, stretching out his long legs. Yaven Altanter Arca was seventeen, the eldest son of the Father of our House. He was an officer in training of the Etran army, and away on duty much of the time now, but when he was home he came to the schoolroom for lessons just as he used to. We loved having him there because, being grown up, he made us all feel grown up, and because he was always good-natured, and because he knew how to get Everra, our teacher, to let us read stories and poems instead of doing grammar and logic exercises.
The girls were coming in now, and Torm ran in with Tib and Hoby from the ball court, sweating, and finally Everra entered, tall and grave in his grey robe. We all reverenced the teacher and sat down on the benches. There were eleven of us, four children of the Family and seven children of the House.
Yaven and Torm were the sons of the Arca Family, Astano was the daughter, and Sotur was their cousin.
Among the house slaves, Tib and Hoby were boys of twelve and thirteen, I was eleven, and Ris and my sister Sallo were thirteen. Oco and her little brother Miv were much younger, just learning their letters.
Copyright © 2007 by Ursula K. Le Guin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B003WJQ7CQ
- Publisher : HMH Books for Young Readers; 1st edition (April 6, 2009)
- Publication date : April 6, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 3066 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Print length : 341 pages
- Lending : Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #274,154 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (US /ˈɜːrsələ ˈkroʊbər ləˈɡwɪn/; born October 21, 1929) is an American author of novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography.
She influenced such Booker Prize winners and other writers as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell – and notable science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She has won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin has resided in Portland, Oregon since 1959.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
So, like. I was reading this trilogy of young-adult books by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The first one was, at a certain level of abstraction, about a young man, of whom there are great expectations, who conquers his fear and his ego to find his true power.
The second one was, at a similar level of abstraction, about a young woman, trapped in a limited and limiting role by a caste of priests, who is freed by the young man from the first book, and goes off with him.
If you see where I'm going with this, you will understand that I had certain expectations concerning _Powers_. Those expectations were, I am happy to say, fully destroyed by the book I actually read; there is no reasonable level of abstraction at which it is similar to _The Farthest Shore_.
Gavir is a slave in the town of Etra. He is a slave of a good family, who by and large treat him well, and is being trained as a scholar to teach the next generation of the family's children - even, yes, the slaves. While we see that other slaves are not as well-treated, and indeed one of the family is not so kind, Gavir does not particularly resent being a slave.
Then - not to be too spoily - two tragedies strike, resulting in Gavir's - well, not exactly running away from slavery; more like wandering off in a daze.
Now, I have briefly and unfairly summarized about two hundred pages of this five hundred page book.
The rest of the book is something of a picaresque novel, as Gavir moves from one social situation to another in succession, learning the ways of the world as he goes. Or perhaps it is a quest novel, where the object of the quest keeps shifting. Gavir gains and loses friends and companions, and ultimately winds up in a much better place (no, I don't mean he dies and goes to Heaven!).
This almost makes it sound as if the book is aimless; it is not. But it takes its own aim, and it takes it carefully, and it takes its time in making it clear what that aim is. From the first, of course, there is the theme of slavery and power. But power manifests itself in many ways throughout the book: there is Gavir's mysterious ability to remember things, including ones that have not yet happened; there are economic power, political power, military power, physical strength, the power of trust (and betrayal), and the power of charisma. _Powers_ is as carefully titled as _Gifts_ and _Voices_.
Gavir is one of Le Guin's most amiable characters. Like many of her protagonists, he begins essentially clueless about a great deal, and gradually learns to negotiate the world and society - yes, it's also a bit of a _bildungsroman_. His learning is organic to the situations he finds himself in,
And the writing - is there anything left to say about Le Guin's prose? - is sharp and clean and beautiful and poetic where it needs to be and prosaic where it must. Gavir's voice is his own, quite distinct from Memer's and Orrec's.
I have one quibble. It isn't a bad thing, but it is a thing. Le Guin was a master of languages and names; indeed, she wrote an essay (partially in response to Tolkien) on the habit of inventing languages. The quibble, then, is that her made-up languages, especially in her young adult fantasies, have a common sound to them. There isn't a name in the Western Shores, of a person, place, or thing, that wouldn't feel perfectly at home in Earthsea - which probably started me off on the wild goose chase with which I began this review; so now I'll stop.
Gavir is an eleven-year old slave boy at the beginning of the story. He is one of the Marsh People, which means he is darker skinned than the other people in his life, apart from his older sister, Sallo. Sallo and Gavir were taken when they were small children, too small to have any memory of their former lives. Now they are slaves in the household of a wealthy family in the city-state of Etra. Gavir is content with his life. He is not a farm slave, laboring in the fields, but a house slave, living in comfort with an enlightened master and his family. In this house, slaves are not beaten or tortured. Slave children play with and are educated alongside the children of the Family. Gavir himself is a promising little scholar, who is being groomed to take over the job of teacher to the household once the slave who currently holds that post grows too old to carry on.
Gavir also has powers, hence the title, powers he barely understands himself. The first is that he has occasional visions, brief glimpses of the future. Gavir calls this “remembering,” in the sense of remembering things that have not yet taken place, though Gavir spends most of the story puzzling over what use this power might have, if any.
The invented world in which the story takes place and Gavir’s visions are the only real fantasy elements in this novel, which otherwise could be taken as an historical tale set in the ancient Mediterranean world. Oh, but wait! Gavir has one other power: a photographic memory, although the book never describes it in those words. It’s a phenomenon we are familiar with in our time, but surely would seem magical to those living in a less advanced culture, and indeed it does to Gavir and the people who know him.
The novel follows Gavir for the next six years of his life, until he’s seventeen. His world seems cozy and secure at first, with his future as a teacher in the household of a kindly master an inviting one. But, alas for Gavir, it is not to be. First, a terrible injustice turns Gavir’s world upside down and compels him to flee his master and Etra, and wander the Western Shore in constant danger. For the relationship between master and slave, as Gavir comes to understand, is based not only on power, but also on trust. A slave must be able to trust the master, and if the master betrays the slave, well, even a slave is capable of betrayal in return.
Gavir’s wanderings take him deep into a forest, where he discovers the legends he has heard are true: hidden deep in the wood is a community of escaped slaves, who live in freedom, as equals. Gavir is welcomed among them. He can recite from memory many of the long poems and tales of old for this band of largely illiterate and isolated ex-slaves, which soon makes him a valued and respected member of the community. But in time, there is another injustice, and Gavir must flee again. He makes his way to the marshes, where he reconnects with his clan and his family among the Marsh People. But the Marsh People are an isolated folk with a very different culture. Gavir finds they do not understand him and he cannot understand them. “The slave takers did not only take me from my people,” he muses. “They took my people from me.”
During his stay with the Marsh People, a vision tells him that his former owners do not believe he is dead, as he had hoped, but in fact a slave catcher is tracking him. Gavir now must leave his people, in the hope he can find a place for himself in this world, before the slave catcher has his vengeance. Perhaps Gavir might even at last find a use for his powers.
You expect elegantly crafted prose from Le Guin, and she does not disappoint here. Powers is largely a character study, as we watch Gavir grow from a naive, hopeful tween forced to become a man all too soon in reaction to the harsh world he lives in. And, led along by Le Guin’s sure hand, we grow right along with him. I had the misfortune of reading the climax of Gavir’s story late at night and found myself forced to keep reading into the small hours of the morning as my heart pounded in fear for Gavir as the slave catcher closes in, and ended the story the same way Gavir did—with tears in my eyes.
Powers is a young adult novel in every sense. It is literally the story of growing up. We can all, like Gavir, recall our sojourn from naive child to disillusioned young adult, wondering all the while what place, if any, this disappointing world holds for us, and so readers of any age can find in him some of our own formative experiences. Gavir’s world is a difficult world, but a textured one. There are no black knights, or white ones, just people making their way through tough circumstances, some more admirably than others. This is a long book, for Gavir has a long journey, but that merely means he has well earned his tears of joy on the final page. Journey by his side, and you will earn yours along with him.
Top reviews from other countries



I have enjoyed these stories for 35,years.

