Comments | oyceter: Le Guin, Ursula K.

oyceter

Le Guin, Ursula K. - Gifts

Jun 15, 2006 00:03

Orrec and Gry live in the Uplands, where every clan has a gift. Gry's gift is calling animals, while Orrec's is to wreak havoc on anything he lays his eyes on. But even though the power balance of their society centers around the gifts, which keeps various clans in check, neither Orrec nor Gry really want to use their gifts the way everyone else ( Read more... )

a: leguin ursula, books: fantasy, books: ya/children's, books

Comments 4

rachelmanija June 15 2006, 07:41:16 UTC

That's exactly how I felt: it was very well-done, but it didn't move into my heart and mind the way a lot of Le Guin's books do.

oyceter June 16 2006, 00:55:06 UTC

Yeah... It's weird because I feel like it should hit a lot of my buttons, but it didn't.

helen_keeble June 15 2006, 10:00:50 UTC

(note: I'm going to talk a little about Voices, the sequel to Gifts, below, but without spoilers for anything beyond what reading the back cover/first few pages/Amazon synopsis would tell you about the set-up)

I've re-read Gifts four or five times now, and it's slowly growing on me. I always admired what it did, but, like you say, I didn't really connect to it emotionally. Having read Voices, I'm finding a new appreciation for Gifts, because I can now compare child!Gry and child!Orrec to their adult versions, and see how those early experiences shaped them.

Gifts is, in my opinion, an intensely claustrophobic book. The characters are tightly constrained by their society and circumstances - they slowly become aware of other choices, other possibilities, but the reader is aware of the constraints from the start. In fact, it seems to me that the reader is very much like Orrec himself, sitting in the dark, but aware that outside there must be a world of light and life...

I get a very similar feeling from Gifts as I do from Le Guin's ( ... )

oyceter June 16 2006, 00:56:19 UTC

Oh, this so isn't the type of response that your comment warrants, because I want to write something long and thinky, except ... I can't think of anything.

So thank you for the notes! And now, I find I'm probably going to pick up Voices and read it, just because I love reading stories of people growing up together and how that works.