I’ve been itching to read this book for years, and I’ve finally gotten around to it. Frankly, I am immensely glad that I did. A lot of what I love about “The Kingkiller Chronicles” holds true for this book: True Names, various systems and styles of magic, a young prodigy… and frankly quite a few small similarities that I appreciated but are not worth individually listing. It’s styled much more after classic fairy tales, but that is no detriment to the book itself.
I enjoy Earthsea‘s world greatly, and its characters. I particularly like the system of naming they have; you are given a birthname, then a true name at adulthood. But this true name is kept secret, so everyone has a “use-name” (not a term I’m fond of, but it does the job). Thus, every character has three names, though we probably only know one of them. I am aware that similar practices exist throughout fiction and even in some places in the real world, but I pretty much always enjoy it, and it was presented to use well in this book. We are introduced to the protagonist by his eventual use-name of “Sparrowhawk,” then we meet him by his birth name of Duny, before he eventually gets his true name, which I’m not going to tell you. Not that it’s a big spoiler, I’m just keeping with the overall spirit of the book. Everyone else we meet is introduced to use only by use-name, except for two other characters whose true names we learn.
I think the only real criticism I have of this book is the sort of treatise on magic presented near the end of the book (as a conversation between Sparrowhawk and Yarrow). It doesn’t really clear up how magic works, it tries to explain too much in a very short space, and it changes tonally from pretty much the rest of the story.
William Cady Likes to Read 