A Wizard of Earthsea Fits an Entire Coming-of-Age Epic Into 180 Pages

Picked this up expecting the usual five hundred page fantasy doorstop and instead got a story that wraps up an entire coming-of-age arc, a genuine wizard-battles-his-own-shadow arc, in under two hundred pages. Didn’t think that was possible for epic fantasy honestly, most books this size feel rushed, but Le Guin makes the compression work by telling it the way an old legend gets told, from a step back, more storyteller voice than deep inside Ged’s own head the way most fantasy narrates these days.

Ged himself is a prideful, gifted kid who summons something he shouldn’t and spends the rest of the book running from the consequences of his own arrogance, and the idea that magic here runs on true names, knowing a thing’s real name gives you power over it, is one of those simple concepts that just clicks and explains why the book feels so careful with language throughout. I’ve seen people wonder out loud if Patrick Rothfuss borrowed from this idea for his own naming magic system, and reading Earthsea it’s easy to see why that comparison comes up.

Only real complaint, and I’ve seen a few other readers land on the same thing, is that the buildups toward each climax are stronger than the climaxes themselves, things resolve fast, sometimes in a matter of seconds, and I was left wanting a beat longer to sit in the moment before the story moved on. Not a dealbreaker, just noticeable once you clock the pattern happening more than once.

Didn’t grow up with this one the way a lot of people my age apparently did, no childhood nostalgia riding on it for me, and it still held up as a genuinely well told, tightly built piece of fantasy on its own merits.