Reviews and Comments

a fun read with beautiful, full worldbuilding and compelling politicking, and plenty of space opera to keep you from putting it down. for me, I didn't find it very striking as a plot or character book, though there's plenty of both, and didn't get much out of it as an ideas book (compared to other SF I've read that plays with self, empire, and language) that said, I do love books that know how to interact with language! linguist-me was left satisfied!

a slow book about translation, motherhood, memory, and compassion. not very much happens but it's so beautifully written you don't notice. not sure if I would have enjoyed it more or less if I'd read it before the AI boom

Not as visceral as the book before it, B"H, but just as powerful.

brutal, increíble

a wonderful ending to a series that (to me) has its ups and downs - the perfect culmination of what the series becomes in the later books. I feel like the themes in this book settled in where previously I had bounced off from them; like all the best capstones of a series, it paints the rest of the two trilogies in a new light, especially in tandem with Tales from Earthsea.

I've been reading through Earthsea half out of duty to finish everything by my favorite author; I hated A Wizard of Earthsea, loved Tombs of Atuan, and then found The Farthest Shore kinda tedious. But this book - written nearly 2 decades after the original trilogy - brought everything I love about Le Guin's work into the Earthsea series in a way that hadn't hooked me before. The prose, both deep and clear, and the rich depictions of life on Gont and musings on culture and gender finally brought what I'd wanted to see in Earthsea to the surface.