A review by paracyclops
The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose by Ursula K. Le Guin

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

The Wind's twelve quarters & the compass rose contains the first two major short story collections of Ursula K. Le Guin's career, which together span the period in which she wrote her best known works, other than Always coming home. Every one of the stories here could warrant a detailed review, so rich are they with thematic content and carefully tuned prose, so I won't even try. The standard of the writing is not so consistently breathtaking as it is across her published novels, for me, but that's all to the good, as it gives the interested reader a little more of an opportunity to look over the shoulder of a writer at work. Having said that, some of the stories here are devastatingly good, and a lot of them pack a huge emotional punch—on several occasions I had to close the book and digest in silence for ten minutes or more at the conclusion of a tale, sometimes weeping. Le Guin was particularly brilliant at writing the perspective of the very old, which ties in very consistently with the theme that seems to dominate her work right across her career: the theme of return, of cyclicity, of narratives and journeys ending where they began. The title of both collections, as well, speaks to the circle of the compass, the broad spread of possibilities, rather than the straight line from here to there. As I always do when I read her work, whether or not I've read it before, I felt that I was coming home to these stories.