He visits Ged, the retired Archmage, who gives him comfort and simple work to do (and a cat!). The story begins with Alder, a village sorcerer having disturbing dreams of the dry lands. Even one character repeatedly shown up as foolish is sympathetic. There are no crude antagonists here, only people trying to understand each other. I like all of Le Guin’s work, but I enjoyed this book more than its two immediate predecessors, and I suspect readers less sympathetic to her writing will like it better too. It will read more easily if you know all three of these, but an adventurous new reader can pick up what needs to be known. The Other Wind follows up on major plot threads from Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea as well as from The Farthest Shore. Now she returns and wrests the complete meaning and significance from it, in an expedition into the roots of the very nature of Earthsea, and of life and death in it. Le Guin explored the dry lands further in her third Earthsea book, The Farthest Shore. Le Guin’s classic A Wizard of Earthsea was of the dry lands, the otherworld where the dead go: the hillside where a simple wall of stones marks the border between the lands of living and of dead, which the living can see only in trance or dream, and must not cross. One of the most memorable images in Ursula K. (This review originally appeared in Mythprint 38:11 (#236) in November 2001.)
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