the Earthsea Quartet by Ursula le Guin

I have to admit that I completely judged this book by its cover. I saw it in a bookshop, the cover caught my eye, and I bought it. There was no blurb on my copy, so I didn’t even have a brief synopsis, but there were dragons on the cover, and I reasoned that dragons are always good to read about, so I got quite excited about reading a book that I essentially knew nothing about for the first time.
The Earthsea Quartet is a fantasy series set in a world made up of hundreds of little islands, where dragons exist and wizards are trained to fight for good or for evil. The series follows the adventures of Sparrowhawk, a wizard, along with various other characters, including Arren, a prince, and Tenar, a child priestess.
I’m sad to say that I was a bit disappointed by this book. I felt as though it just didn’t really add anything to an already-existing genre. In all fairness, I probably read this book at the wrong time, since I was really wanting to read The Winds of Winter which hasn’t been written yet and thought starting a new fantasy series set in another fantasy world would be a good substitute, and I probably shouldn’t have read all four books at once, as if they were all one big book, but I knew that if I didn’t I would never come back to this series, and I wanted to persevere with it. Nevertheless, I felt like there wasn’t a lot of character development and there were points where the book really lagged.
That said, I did really enjoy The Tombs of Atuan and I quite enjoyed Tehanu as well. I think a lot of that was to do with them being told from Tenar’s perspective, who was probably the most interesting and complex character in the series. Tehanu was also written in a very different style and offered the most in-depth character development, particularly in Sparrowhawk’s case, while dealing with some important issues in society, such as sexism and child abuse, and even threw some romance into the mix. However, despite being an enjoyable read, the final book in The Earthsea Quartet was lacking in plot development and had a rather rushed and confusing conclusion which left a few loose ends still dangling.
Even A Wizard of Earthsea had some enjoyable parts. I loved Vetch and was genuinely moved when he told Sparrowhawk his true name.
Aside from all else, this is probably the only fantasy series I have ever read where the hero is not white, and I was very impressed with the racial diversity within the book.
All in all, this was not a bad book, but it is not one I would be in a hurry to read again, and I’m unlikely to recommend it to anyone else.