Presenting Ursula K. Le Guin

In this volume Suzanne Elizabeth Reid takes her reader on a journey through Ursula K. Le Guin’s world, from childhood summers spent in California’s Napa Valley; to the shipboard romance with her future husband, Charles A. Le Guin; to her poetic life in one of Portland’s multiethnic neighborhoods. Reid explores how these events have influenced Le Guin’s work. Her parents were Alfred Kroeber, the famed head of UC-Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology, and Theodora Kroeber Quinn, author of Ishi in Two Worlds, a biography of the last member of California’s Yahi Indians. Her parents’ work with Native Americans lay down the threads of Le Guin’s environmentalism and pacifism, philosophies that pervade all of her work. In Le Guin’s eyes, the individual finds fulfillment not by struggling against the natural world but by seeking his or her place within it. This is true not only for the young people who come of age in many of Le Guin’s novels, including the four books of the Earthsea series, but also for her older characters. Readers of all ages can identify with these protagonists as they struggle to find the answers to the same questions that concern us all, independent of time or place.
Just as Le Guin’s writings challenge her characters and her audience to reexamine themselves, Reid’s critical look at those writings will challenge the young adult reader to delve into the genres of science fiction/fantasy and, more generally, young adult literature. Neither Reid nor Le Guin expect any less of works written in these venues, judging them and promoting them as the equal of realistic adult fiction. As Le Guin asserts, “The most childish thing about A Wizard of Earthsea is its coming of age.” In this exhaustive review of Le Guin’s work to date, including her most recently published collection of related novellas, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Reid shows us how the only thing childish about the imagination is our refusal to accept it as a vital part of ourselves. This is an important lesson for all of us to learn, whether we are fifteen or forty-five.