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A review by dhiyanah
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
adventurous
challenging
emotional
tense
slow-paced
4.5
This year (2025), I hope to complete my reading of Ursula K. Le Guin's 'Earthsea' cycle. I decided to pick up the series with a reread of 'The Farthest Shore,' since I remembered very little of it.
Reading this at a time when so much innocence, belief, and ethics are being thoroughly impoverished and attacked, I felt it viscerally the description of how magic was being drained out of the world by a force that holds no respect for nature or its Life/Death/Life cycles. There is a hole somewhere here, too, where oblivion distorts reality, where artificiality smothers intelligence, where false hierarchies rip us apart. There is an urgency here, too, for all this to end somewhere. To recover, somehow. Safely.
Unlike fantasy epics, we can't wait for a chosen-one type to fix the problem. Even in 'The Farthest Shore,' Ged couldn't do it alone. But the journey towards compassionate resolution costs a lot in a world desensitized to cruelty - with enemies playing pretend at immortality - and that's something potent that this book has offered me. A consideration for these times, a reminder to be steadfast in valuing Life within its wider, magical cycles.
Reading this at a time when so much innocence, belief, and ethics are being thoroughly impoverished and attacked, I felt it viscerally the description of how magic was being drained out of the world by a force that holds no respect for nature or its Life/Death/Life cycles. There is a hole somewhere here, too, where oblivion distorts reality, where artificiality smothers intelligence, where false hierarchies rip us apart. There is an urgency here, too, for all this to end somewhere. To recover, somehow. Safely.
Unlike fantasy epics, we can't wait for a chosen-one type to fix the problem. Even in 'The Farthest Shore,' Ged couldn't do it alone. But the journey towards compassionate resolution costs a lot in a world desensitized to cruelty - with enemies playing pretend at immortality - and that's something potent that this book has offered me. A consideration for these times, a reminder to be steadfast in valuing Life within its wider, magical cycles.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism
Moderate: Death, Violence, Fire/Fire injury, Injury/Injury detail