Spoiler-free summary: As a young girl, Tenar is taken from her family, identified as the reincarnation of the highest ranked priestess at a holy site. Her life is to be a lonely, limited one, carrying out rituals for the Nameless Ones, but things are shaken up when an unauthorized visitor comes. The second book in the Earthsea fantasy series, this starts slow but becomes a page-turner by the end.
Discussion: I’ve mentioned that there are a handful of Newbery winners that come from the middle of series, and in my readthrough of all of them a few years ago, I did not bother reading the earlier entries before tackling the winners. I’ve been meaning to read more Ursula Le Guin, though — I finally read my first by her a year or two ago, The Left Hand of Darkness, and enjoyed it — so I decided to read A Wizard of Earthsea before taking on The Tombs of Atuan.
I never felt like I was lost with reading the mid-series Newbery winners, and I think I could have gotten away with coming into this blind. A Wizard of Earthsea was a solid four-out-of-five-stars fantasy book, so it was worth reading for its own sake, but it did change the experience of reading Tombs, and I think significantly. For one thing, knowing who Ged was meant I believed him and rooted for Arha to trust him, but without reading Wizard, I probably would have had doubts about whether he was telling the truth. Le Guin also raises the possibility that the Nameless Ones are superstitions and the people without faith are correct, even to the point where I, having read Wizard, doubted things a bit. But of course they’re real — we saw stuff like them all over the first book! When Ged says he’s using all his energy to restrain them while escaping the labyrinth, this isn’t a trick on Arha, it is actually an unseen fight between two insanely powerful forces.
I like how different the scale of this book was compared to Wizard. There, Ged starts in an isolated, backwoods town, and then goes to explore the entire world as the most powerful wizard ever, even visiting a place no one else has before at the climax. It’s a world-building fantasy novel to a grand degree. Tombs is the opposite, the first 90% or so of the book exists in an incredibly small area with few characters, and it’s not clear if Arha is truly anything special. Still, though, there is world-building happening; sometimes the best way to create a sense of scale is to hint at things that are unknown or lost to time. The Tombs and the labyrinth are ancient, and there is history to Arha’s position as High Priestess that you want to know more about but never will. I haven’t read a ton of fantasy, but I was obsessed with the Star Wars Extended Universe novels in middle school. Sometimes the best stories were small, specific ones, not the ones about entire planets and galaxywide power struggles.
Earthsea started as a trilogy, which Le Guin then came back to about 20 years later and added even more. I’ll probably at least read book three at some point, this is a world I want to revisit and learn more about.
Next up is another Civil War-era biography, Abraham Lincoln, Friend of the People by Clara Ingram Judson.
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