The Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. LeGuin

⭐ 6.5/10

(Originally written by Magdalene)

I wanted to like this way more than I did. While reading I had to remind myself when this was written (1968), and that fantasy was a whole different genre that it is now. She was doing cool stuff for her time, but reading it today, the characters felt flat, although the world-building was impressive. I believe she was influential on fantasy, and it's cool she was one of the first to have non-white characters in fantasy. But... I didn't actually enjoy reading this book much. Her writing was somewhere between Lewis and Tolkien in terms of wordiness, but maybe this just reminded me of them because she was writing shortly after them. Still mostly a big quest, with a few side-quests in between.

The main character is Ged, who obviously has some wizard powers at a young age, so he gets sent to wizard school. He's better than everyone else, so he starts getting proud. His enemy challenges him, and Ged tries out a spell he shouldn't know and accidentally unleashes an evil shadow that almost kills him and follows him wherever he goes. To re-achieve equilibrium, he needs to figure out how to banish the shadow once again.

Again, lots of cool elements, but I never got into it. I didn't really care about Ged. I'm sure it was super cool 5 decades ago, but reading it today as an adult, I was pretty unmoved. Maybe I'm just too used to today's much flashier fantasy.