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A really wonderful book except my stomach churned at the age gap romance. On the one hand you could say this was written in the 1990's so I should not be so critical. But I kind of want to still be critical. The main character. She's 16. She is a child. She is not an adult. It's just gross. If she had just been aged up everything would be perfect. I kept trying to imagine her as older so my stomach would not churn at the romance parts. The authors excuse at the end for the age gap is deplorable. I had a rotten childhood and at 16 was very traumatized which would make the idea of a man 11 years my senior being into me that much more horrific. No you can't say a 16 year old is "mature" enough to be with a much older person because they've experienced hardship. In fact it makes it all the more disgusting and predatory that a child who has been through hell and just needs caring adults in her life would then become the love interest to one of the caring adults who is her teacher/father figure. In real life the power imbalance is terrible. In the fantasy novel it's still there even if you want to argue they both have "magic powers." True but one is an older adult. The other is a child. Regardless of magic powers it's still just a man preying on a child who is emotionally vulnerable. Ugh. But yea the series was a lot of fun to read. It really was. But I just have to imagine these two characters as being the same age. Then it be fine.

This is the most well written fairy tale centered on how a violent rape causes severe trauma to the heroines mind. The magic bits thrown in feel raw, emotional, and powerful as they should for such a dark tale. It is a beautiful story. I wish I had read this many years ago.

I love Ursula but this has been my least liked book of hers so I'm giving 4 stars instead of 5. I enjoyed the heavy intellectual ideas. I enjoyed the romance. I was utterly destroyed that she made this main character who I had thoroughly liked, out of nowhere sexually assault a woman because he experiences alcohol for the first time in his life. The way it's written is really fucking blaming the woman victim character while our main character dude just gets to brush it off and go on with his life as the hero and doesn't even think about this incident for even one goddamn second for the rest of the book. I know Ursula took some serious thoughts about feminism later in life and made some apologies and changes in her writing with the Earthsea series which I thought was wonderful. I really wish she had taken the time to go back and edit or at least write an apology about this. It fucking sucks. The rest of the story is great. This one scene should be deleted. It's fucking horrible. And no it's totally not believable that creating an anarchist communist society would suddenly erase rape and that rape is just an invention of capitalism and greed. Yea no. I can't bite down on that idea at all. The other heavy ideas make sense but only up to a point and then it's just like trying to say capitalism causes humans to rape. Like no fuck you. Rapists are psychopaths. They are the same as murderers. They are born with it in their brain. They cannot feel empathy. They are predators. Society can't make them do it or not do it. They exist in every society through all time. They can't be fixed either. And a man who is absolutely loving to his true love, his little daughters will not just suddenly sexually assault a woman because he got exposed to capitalism and alcohol and "went crazy." Fucking bullshit rape apology sexist bullshit. And then feel absolutely no remorse about it? Cmon!!