Hugo Reading Progress

2024 Hugo Awards Progress
11 items read/watched / 57 (19.30%)

26 August 2013

A Visit to Earthsea, Part IV: Tehanu

Mass market paperback, 281 pages
Published 2001 (originally 1990)
Acquired August 2008
Read September 2012
Tehanu
by Ursula K. Le Guin

It's depressing, to find out what happened to Tenar after The Tombs of Atuan. One wishes she would have had great adventures, but Tehanu shows that wasn't the case at all. This is a feminist rewriting of the original three Earthsea books-- but it's done by the original author, like if Charlotte Brontë wrote both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea herself. Which I like: it means that when the world of Earthsea changes, that the actual world of Earthsea changes, not some kind of ersatz version of it.

This is the moment that stuck out to me the most, where Tenar reflects on what it's like to be a woman of a different race than everyone else around you: "I wonder what a white woman's like, white all over? their eyes said, looking at her, until she got older and they no longer saw her."

No comments:

Post a Comment