A Wizard of EarthSea was at times awe inspiring, beautiful, and poetic. It struck a cord with me and instantly jumped into a top 5 spot within the first couple pages. To start, the prose is achingly beautiful.

The pictures conjured in my mind from Le Guin’s prose are far more than what the words actually say. There’s an indescribable poetic feeling to Le Guin’s scenes and images. I actually felt like I was tossed on the sea with the protagonist. I sat in rapt awe at the dragon that unfurled itself from the ruined tower and loomed over the town. I loved that scene. It was one of several scenes that made me feel a genuine sense of awe and terror in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time. I actually wanted to physically cower as I read it. I reread that scene again while writing this review and it still awed me. A sure sign that it wasn’t just me being in the right mindset to be wowed, but because the book did it so well.

I was enthralled from the start because Le Guin executes so consistently at such a high level. This built a trust in the book to nail the next anticipated scene. This contrasted so strongly with the last book I read The Aeronaut’s Windlass. A quarter of the way into that one and I knew the author wasn’t going to pull it off, so I lost interest. This is a new theory on story craft I’m concocting.

The magic system is based on knowing a being’s “true” name. Everyone and everything has a public or common name, and an inner or private “true” name. The “true” name has power, power the magically adept can use or abuse. It’s a beautiful system for the ethereal metaphorical style Le Guin employs. The magic system also deals heavily with maintaining balance in a taoist yin and yang manner. Every use of magic has to be weighed carefully so as not to disrupt that delicate balance.

The world in A Wizard of Earthsea is a collection of island archipelagos amongst an endless ocean. The races and characters that inhabit these islands are all distinct which makes the world feel alive. The legends these people hold tell of a creation myth of a primordial being who drove the mountains out of the endless sea. I love how these little bits of lore leave me yearning for more. Is the sea really endless and was it always so endless? We are told dragons are older than the race of men, how did they become? How did men? It is my theory that the primordial being was actually a wizard who broke the balance of the world and turned it into an endless sea, and then tried to fix it. But I don’t know and I love that.

The protagonist is a young boy named Ged whom we are told in the very beginning will eventually become the strongest wizard in the history of Earthsea. But right now he is an arrogant and prideful child with more power than he thinks he knows how to handle. Like most hot headed youth he doesn’t listen to cooler heads during a fight that breaks the delicate balance in the world and ushers in a nameless shadow. Something no one can control. We then watch him grow into a wiser young man who learns to carefully consider the consequences of his actions before making them. A lesson I’m sure every parent wishes their kid would learn.

I was first made aware of A Wizard of Earthsea when watching Tales From Earthsea, that bad Studio Ghibli movie. It was such a surprisingly bad film from a normally excellent studio I wanted to learn more about it. Finding out it was from a beloved fantasy series from an author I had heard of in passing, and I was intrigued. I’m deeply glad I checked it out because like I said before, this is now one of my favorite books of all time.