tannervolz 's review for:

The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin

3.0

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“The Beginning Place” is middling, a slight story that wastes its own potential. It’s mysterious and interesting until it becomes a bit of a Dragonslayer clone. It is, however, one of her most gorgeously written books. This was when she really started to lose patience with the delineation of forms; her prose here is largely poetry compressed into sentences, just as much of her poetry reads like prose. I like her frequent narrative format, following protagonists as they walk long distances from and to nowhere in particular; this one is just too much of it and it’s inert.