Amazon.com: Customer reviews: A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle Series Book 1)

Top positive review

Magic With Consequences

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2016

Earthsea’s approach to magic deeply intrigued me. Like most human beings I find the idea of magic fascinating. To be able to wave my hand or a wand, say a word, and have what I want to happen is a very seductive daydream. However, I find that it usually accompanied by a bitter aftertaste. The bitterness stems from where magic meets reality. Rarely are there any solid attempts (or any attempts at all) to explain how magic works, what rules there are to using it, and the consequences of using it. While I can read books that involve magic, and enjoy them, I have a greater appreciation for those books where the author treats the magic as more than mere entertainment for the reader. Usula Le Guin does a remarkable job in A Wizard of Earthsea: Book 1.

Instead of giving in to the readers’ magical fantasies by having her hero use fantastic powers in battle for the purposes of shock and awe, she moves the opposite direction. We see little magic from Ged throughout the book even though one powerful wizard has foreseen that Ged will become the most powerful among them. Unlike Harry Potter where magic is used at every turn for the delight of the reader, Le Guin shows magic sparingly even though her world is full of it. For me that is a refreshing twist.
Ironically Ged, when he learns he has a propensity for magic, dreams like any of us would of all the things he will do with his magic when he learns how to use it. The day comes when a wizard takes him on as an apprentice. Ogion subtly showed great power by easily bringing Ged back from a near-death state that had been brought on by Ged’s overextending what little power he then had to save his village from attackers.

Ged is soon disappointed by this Ogion’s hesitancy to use magic. He won’t even use it to stop the rain so that they can sleep dry while traveling through the forest.

But Ogion let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay
down beneath it. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen,
and wondered what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use
it, and wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale,
where at least he would have slept dry.

I was impressed by Le Guin’s responsible approach toward magic. I was happy at how she carried out this restraint throughout the book, successfully using the restraint to keep my attention and not boring me.

Ged is unhappy with his tutelage by Ogion as it seems nothing more than learning how to live with nature. He doesn’t understand, or perhaps he just doesn’t have enough patience, to accept that this oneness with nature is the source of Ogion’s great power. Even after seeing a terrifying display of Ogion’s power, once more to save Ged’s life:

The door was flung wide. A man entered with a white light flaming about him, a
great bright figure who spoke aloud, fiercely and suddenly. The darkness and the whispering ceased and were dispelled.

Ged jumps at the chance to leave his apprenticeship under Ogion and go to the great wizarding school on the island of Roke.

But even on Roke, where Ged excels in his studies, the wizards, masters of magic, teach restraint in using it. I found I bought in wholeheartedly to Le Guin’s magical philosophy taught through these wizards.

To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son,
even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world . . . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

Yes! A world of magic that has teeth. Using magic in this world has consequences.

Ged progresses in magic faster than he is emotionally mature and this, of course, leads to the conflict. Through pride and carelessness he calls something into the world that has no name and thus cannot be controlled by any wizard, let alone the young Ged. The rest of the book is about Ged surviving while learning how to face this dark power he has unleashed.

Ged, a young wizard who gets little respect and who is struggling for his life still lives as a hero. While confronting a dragon, and very possibly death, Ged is given a great temptation. The dragon, in a bid to save itself has a proposition:

“Yet I could help you. You will need help soon, against that which hunts you in the dark.”

Ged stood dumb.

“What is it that hunts you? Name it to me. . . . If you could name it you could master it, maybe, little wizard.
Maybe I could tell you its name, when I see it close by. And it will come close, if you wait about my isle.”

If Ged makes the deal he may save himself, but at the cost of the village who has hired him to save them.

Le Guin’s book reads like most novels you’ve read, but in tone it feels like a story being told around a campfire.

"So bolstering up his pride, he set all his strong will n the work they gave him, the lessons and crafts and histories and skills taught by the grey-cloaked masters of Roke, who were called the Nine."

The world she creates has great detail while at the same time displaying a sparseness that a story of the oral tradition might have. This bothered me a little, falling short of the Tolkien complexity of details, and yet intrigued me as a legitimate, polished style she consciously chose.

If you are a serious fan of fantasy, but haven’t read A Wizard of Earthsea, you ought to. You may not like Le Guin’s style as opposed to how writers are writing today, but it is serious book, very readable, that will give good contrast to the other books of magic you may come across and make your reading experiences more pleasurable.Jacob and Lace

39 people found this helpful

Top critical review

All critical reviews›

Lindsy HC

Paperback is not mass market paperback size

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 8, 2023

Bought as a gift, so I can't comment on the story. However, this book is listed as paperback, but isn't the typical mass market paperback size. For someone who is particular about their books or book shelves, it's disappointing.

Sort by

Filter by

5,744 total ratings, 1,095 with reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

From the United States

Tory Anderson

Magic With Consequences

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2016

Verified Purchase

39 people found this helpful

Helpful

Grabast family

Read in youth understood in age, forever a mage

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 31, 2022

Verified Purchase

When I first found this book it lit my imagination and fueled a reality I longed to understand. Over the years it has fueled my imagination more and been a light for the reality I still long to understand but know that reality will never be understood while one lives in it. Though a work of fiction the words ring as true as any history known. A simply put... Must read book and series. My thanks to an author that fed meaning to a life I was so uncertain of.

Helpful

Fredrik Malcus

Earthsea the beginning

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 2, 2023

Verified Purchase

So much joy starts with this. Remarkable, inventive, world builder, nature loving, people seeing, dragon friend and not without danger.

Helpful

Gerokee

Leaves a lot of gaps in the story, still well worth a read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 22, 2022

Verified Purchase

In newer literature, this book would span thrice the amount of pages. Lots of things remain unexplained or are only hinted at. The system of magic remains quite arbitrary, for most of the time the reader is left wondering why not more of our is used. "Equilibrium" is the intangible answer. Islands are enumerated, touched and left behind so fast they do not leave a memory imprint. The main antagonist unexpectedly disappears from the story almost entirely (unless I missed a hint). The protagonist is the only character which has development, and even that is limited to a few major events. The climax is very short, quite uneventful, and precedes the end of the book by just a few paragraphs. No concepts or style elements seem very unique, but this could be true from today's perspective only, and maybe there was a lot of originality back when the book was written.

And yet it's a very enjoyable read. The slightly stilted language creates an air of dignity, the speed of the story is taking the reader for a breathless ride which makes it hard to put the book down, the scenes are vivid without needing long descriptions.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

PlantBirdWoman

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin: A review

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 19, 2016

Verified Purchase

How is it that I have been a constant reader all these mumble, mumble years and I've never read any of Ursula K. Le Guin's work? It defies comprehension. How many other wonderful writers have I overlooked along the way?

I was reminded of Le Guin recently when I was reading an article about influential women writers and her name was on the list of ten presented by the author. It seemed like a kick in the pants that I needed to stick one of her books into my reading queue and finally make her acquaintance. I decided to start with the Earthsea Cycle, her series of fantasy adventures. A Wizard of Earthsea was the first in the series.

Earthsea is Le Guin's equivalent of Middle Earth or the Seven Kingdoms - a fantastical world where sorcerers, wizards, witches, and dragons hold sway. A Wizard of Earthsea introduces us to young Sparrowhawk, a child who early on shows that he possesses the powers of a wizard. He is sent to apprentice with a master called Ogion, and his true name, Ged, is revealed. But at a certain point, the impatient Ged comes to feel that Ogion is holding him back. He's teaching him foundational stuff but what the youth wants is to learn "real magic."

Ogion offers Ged the opportunity to go to a place called Roke where there is something like an academy of wizardry that has an advanced course of learning. There, Ged makes a friend, Vetch, but he also makes an enemy, Jasper. He and Jasper are consumed by jealousy of each other and they engage in schoolboy dares, each trying to best his opponent.

In response to one of Jasper's dares, Ged summons the spirit of a long dead woman, but when the spirit comes, there also comes a shadow that is loosed on the world. That shadow becomes Ged's nemesis. It hunts him to annihilate him. The rest of the story tells of Ged's quest to master the shadow and destroy it before it destroys him. As he becomes the hunter rather than the hunted, he is joined by his friend, Vetch.

Ged is a flawed character, a stereotypical cocky adolescent who thinks he knows it all. Even though he is a wizard of formidable talent, he screws up time and again and must spend much of his time trying to rectify his mistakes. He seems, in other words, altogether human.

The story reminds the reader of many others that concern the hero's journey. Most obviously, perhaps, is The Lord of the Rings with the perilous journey of Frodo and Sam. But it also has clear connections to the Arthurian legends and the struggles of the Knights of the Round Table against evil in the world. This is a much slimmer volume than those tales and much of it is taken up with exposition of Ged's childhood and adolescence, background material for the rest of the series.

It's interesting that there are no armies, no wars here and not much bloodshed - unless you count the blood of the six dragons that Ged kills. In an afterword to the Kindle edition which I read, the author makes the point that this was deliberate. She set out to write a fantasy featuring the struggle between good and evil that was not drenched in blood. In her telling of that struggle, the key turns out to be to know yourself and to remain true to that self. Another important key is to know the true name of the evil you are wrestling. To know a thing's true name is to know its nature and to be able to gain power over it.

Also, in the afterword, Le Guin makes a point that her heroes in the story are people of color, a refreshing change from most contemporary fantasies or sci-fi of the time this book was published in which the heroes are almost always white guys. Even though she didn't make a big point of the characters' color in telling the story, this was her subtle bit of subversion back in 1968.

17 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jim Holroyd

A Book about a Wizarding school predating Harry Potter

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

A copper toned boy goes to Roke to learn to be a wizard, but this is no woke retelling of Harry Potter, this book came out three decades before Harry Potter. Back then, in 1967, wizards were all, more or less, Merlin and Gandalf. Old men, peaked hats, white beards. But this is a book for young people. Well, Merlin and Gandalf must have been young once, right? In this fantasy bildungsroman, Ged or Sparrowhawk, our protagonist is the son of a taciturn copper smith. His innate skills as a wizard are helped by the local witch but "much of her lore was mere rubbish and humbug, nor did she know the true spells from the false". After he saves the village by conjuring up a mist to confuse some Viking-like Karg raiders, Ged is sought out by a seasoned wizard, Ogion, who trains him before letting him go to the wizard school in Roke. Unlike Hogwarts the wizard school is not co-ed, only boys can be wizards. With great power comes great responsibility, Ged is warned "Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?" Ged is drawn into a dangerous dare by his rival Jesper to summon the spirits of the dead, this goes wrong and he falls into a dark underworld and emerges with a gebbeth or shadow creature, which creates the conflict for the rest of the book. "He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul."
First he is fleeing this darkness and then hunting it in an odyssey around the world of Earthsea, luckily he doesn't need riches to travel, "A wizard’s staff is passport and payment on most ships. " As much as this is an odyssey around the world of Earthsea it is also an internal voyage of self discovery for Ged.
There isn't a huge cast of characters, apart from Ged the only standout characters are his wizard friend Vetch and his sensei Ogion. There is also not a lot of dialogue, LeGuin tells us what has been said rather than showing us what they are saying.
Overall this was an enjoyable read and I can see it as a pioneering work in the fantasy genre.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Jared S. Runck

A First of Its Kind

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 26, 2018

Verified Purchase

Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away this year, is a long-recognized force in the world of science fiction and has won every major award within the genre (e.g., the Hugo and Nebula Awards) multiple times. A Wizard of Earthsea is her second published novel (1968) and fell within what was then the rather new field of "fantasy fiction," a genre that she acknowledges in this edition's afterword was inaugurated, for all intents and purposes by J.R.R. Tolkien's publication of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Thus, Le Guin and the world of Earthsea are key to the development of an entire fictional genre.
In brief (trying to avoid unnecessary spoilers), the book introduces us to the great wizard Ged (known as Sparrowhawk) before he was the great Archmage of Earthsea. The book is really the story of a boy's journey to manhood, a story of Ged's quest to find himself and face his deepest fears, more than anything else. It is a long lesson in the dangers of power mixed with human pride. Though Le Guin doesn't name it as such, the darkness that Ged both unleashes and (eventually) conquers represented, to my theologically-inclined reading, what much of Scripture defines as "Sin," a kind of negative "un-being" set to destroy us and the world we inhabit through us. Perhaps this is proof, yet again, that, like Tolkien said, every story is an echo of THE Story of world redemption that is the core of Scripture.
I am reminded of an essay by C.S. Lewis that I read long ago in my high school literature textbook. Though I've long forgotten the title, I recall two things: first, that it was an essay regarding cave drawings (I suppose it was occasioned by some then-recent discovery) and, second, that it was a meditation on the meaning and nature of artistic genius. As I recall, Lewis' key question was our designation of cave art as "primitive," as if to diminish its artistry. Though artistic form has certainly developed dramatically since those first cave drawings, Lewis pondered this question (in paraphrase): "What kind of genius would it take to decide to draw the FIRST picture?" The work is an expression of genius simply by being the first of its kind.
Looking back from 50 years on, I suppose that it might be easy for contemporary readers to find fault with this or that aspect of the book (though, I hasten to add, the book has never been out of print since its first publication in 1968). I could even say that I was inclined to consider her style, with its pursuit of sounding like an ancient tale, to be a bit stilted, even pompous, when compared to Tolkien's much lighter touch. I could also add that the book seems a bit too preoccupied with explanations of how magic works within the world of Earthsea. But even these criticisms are hard to sustain. Le Guin's writing is beautiful in its oddity (much like some passages of the King James Version), and, as the first work in a series, it is important that we learn the nature of the world that is Earthsea. And, more importantly, like those ancient cave drawings, it really is the "first of its kind," and deservedly recognized as a work of genius.

16 people found this helpful

Helpful

A well done classic prequel to Tales from Earthsea

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 26, 2022

Verified Purchase

I had never heard of this series prior to my watching of the movie Tales from Earthsea, so this book serves as a prequel to one of the major characters, Sparrowhawk: his journey from youth to seasoned sorcerer, how he got the scars on his face, and a glimpse at the possible origin of the evil seen in Tales from Earthsea. The main antagonist is interesting, and the interactions between it and Sparrowhawk--as well as the push-and-pull relationship surrounding the two of them as hunter and hunted--are engaging. The fantasy and worldbuilding is done naturally without too much plain exposition, and magic is portrayed with all the danger, complexity, caution, and power that a fantasy world such as Earthsea would require. This book serves as a kind of cautionary tale for when one gets caught up in something not quite understood, but it also serves a way to overcome such folly, a hard and difficult way, which only the brave, responsible, and true-of-heart can hope to survive.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Slade

Simple and beautiful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

There's so much to say about a book that doesn't need to go into the historical details about the living world the characters occupy.
Masterfully written.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Lindsy HC

Paperback is not mass market paperback size

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 8, 2023

Verified Purchase

Helpful

Need customer service? Click here

‹ See all details for A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle Series Book 1)

5 star		63%
4 star		23%
3 star		10%
2 star		3%
1 star		2%

A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle Series Book 1)

›

Customer reviews

Customer reviews

A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle Series Book 1)

Top positive review

Top critical review

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

From the United States

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle Series Book 1) › Customer reviews

Customer reviews

A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle Series Book 1)

Top positive review

Top critical review

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

From the United States

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle Series Book 1)

›

Customer reviews