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mugwortandmohair 's review for:
The Farthest Shore
by Ursula K. Le Guin
A lovely little adventure story but seriously lacking in depth, pacing, and character development.
It was a page-turner, but the personalities felt paper-thin throughout, lacking substance. You couldn't tear them free of the pages and plop them into the real world; they lacked fears, ambitions, passions, secrets. Though I adored Sparrowhawk in both [b:A Wizard of Earthsea|13642|A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1353424536s/13642.jpg|113603] and [b:The Tombs of Atuan|13662|The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1417900879s/13662.jpg|1322146], in The Farthest Shore he felt like the typical wizard trope: an old, graying man with a lined face who has seen a lifetime of wondrous things and who is now serious and pensive and troubled by a great darkness, and who lives in physical and emotional isolation from others and who saves his magic, cast with his trusty, ever-present wizard's staff, for great works. They weren't believable as people.
The brevity of The Farthest Shore was its biggest disappointment. I think it could have been a five-star book if it had been at least twice as long (my edition is roughly 300 pages, but they are very small pages) -- if Le Guin had given herself more time to mold the story, I'm sure she could have solved the character development problem, too.
Read my complete review at my book blog, Literary Leisure.
It was a page-turner, but the personalities felt paper-thin throughout, lacking substance. You couldn't tear them free of the pages and plop them into the real world; they lacked fears, ambitions, passions, secrets. Though I adored Sparrowhawk in both [b:A Wizard of Earthsea|13642|A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1353424536s/13642.jpg|113603] and [b:The Tombs of Atuan|13662|The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1417900879s/13662.jpg|1322146], in The Farthest Shore he felt like the typical wizard trope: an old, graying man with a lined face who has seen a lifetime of wondrous things and who is now serious and pensive and troubled by a great darkness, and who lives in physical and emotional isolation from others and who saves his magic, cast with his trusty, ever-present wizard's staff, for great works. They weren't believable as people.
The brevity of The Farthest Shore was its biggest disappointment. I think it could have been a five-star book if it had been at least twice as long (my edition is roughly 300 pages, but they are very small pages) -- if Le Guin had given herself more time to mold the story, I'm sure she could have solved the character development problem, too.
Read my complete review at my book blog, Literary Leisure.