A review by lory_enterenchanted
The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin

emotional mysterious reflective

2.5

I loved 95% of this book, the characters, their retreat into a strange twilight land, their meeting each other, initially as antagonists, and the inevitable rapprochement ... but the "sex as redemption" scene turned me off completely. Le Guin has pulled this card elsewhere, in Tehanu and in the first story of Five Ways to Forgiveness, for example, and it can be done tastefully, but here it just seemed to come out of nowhere, and to be crassly allegorical. The man, after slaying the hideous symbol of his evil mother, has to come back to life by "mounting" (!!!) his female companion. She, meanwhile, seems to have lost all of the voice and agency she had formerly in the story, mutely acquiescing to this role as a sex object (in her "real life" plot thread she's been abused by her stepfather; she appears to be falling into this pattern again, as is all too common). I only wish this aspect of the relationship had been more carried and filled out, and had not been so one-sided.