I liked the narrative style ,and I think it helped the "generic" story become something larger than itself if that makes sense. A straightforward telling of the novel would have lost some of the Mythic quality that made it so nifty to read. That quality reinforced the journey of the Hero tale, and worked well together
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Not In Order....lightbearerFebruary 17 2010, 16:42:03 UTC
The book's not really that racially diverse; pretty much everyone, as you said, are copper- and brown-skinned. IIRC, the islands of Earthsea are reasonably close to the equator, so that certainly makes sense from a physiological perspective. The cultural differences were more noticeable than the racial ones, if only because there's not much in the realm of racial issues when everyone seems to be racially nigh-homogeneous.
Gender issues bugged LeGuin enough that she picked them up in another (much later) book, but we can discuss that if we ever read Tehanu. Suffice to say that I shrugged with this book. Archetypes and publication date.
Roke is much more a medieval university sort of school. Hogwarts tried to be a Very High Fantasy equivalent of an English boarding school. Personally, I preferred Roke. I think lilisonna's term of 'grounded' works well here. Hogwarts, for all the later books, seems more ... ethereal and ephemeral, perhaps for its remove from the outside world. Roke is, in some ways, the center of its world.
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Gender issues bugged LeGuin enough that she picked them up in another (much later) book, but we can discuss that if we ever read Tehanu. Suffice to say that I shrugged with this book. Archetypes and publication date.
Roke is much more a medieval university sort of school. Hogwarts tried to be a Very High Fantasy equivalent of an English boarding school. Personally, I preferred Roke. I think lilisonna's term of 'grounded' works well here. Hogwarts, for all the later books, seems more ... ethereal and ephemeral, perhaps for its remove from the outside world. Roke is, in some ways, the center of its world.
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