Reviews and Comments

A beautiful book about looking, surviving and flourishing.

This was a reread--it felt so modern--disturbingly so. I read it as a teenager and I was way too close to the narrative. So little has changed around mental illness and the medical profession. The prose is so good. I relished it and its angry humour. The only thing dated in it would be the racism of the narrator.

Rereading this again after 40 years. It still vivid in my memory & feels so modern and relevant.

I often choose my next book at random from the library shelves. I do this alphabetically. I was on O when I chose this book--a Kafkaesque allegory of memory and state surveillance. Despite being written 30 years ago, it's chillingly relevant right now.

This is the second time reading this cycle, and I have to say that revisiting this over the last two months--which is how long it took me to read all four books--has been a revelation. I appreciate that to say what she needed to say, at the time she said it, Le Guin needed the books to be very male centred, yet this culminates in the final book, Tehanu--to a story of survival, trauma and women's power. So grateful now that I am an older woman, to have these books

testing my new Kobo with borrowing library books. I didn't realise this was YA

Pretty sure this is where I left off in this series! This is why I need to keep track somewhere!

I read this cycle in the 1990s and am returning to it. I see so much more in it now, and how satisfying it is to get to Tehanu, the fourth book, infused with old women's wisdom, now that I am an old woman.

This book is a grim masterpiece and a cautionary tale.

This volume of poems captures with elegant tenderness the difficult days of the Covid lockdowns.

My first read of 2025--which seems apt given the political atmospheric. This book is an allegorical condemnation of white European settlers' concept of Manifest Destiny, but it is also a masterpiece of the horror genre.