If I ever make a "must reads for teens" list one day this book will absolutely be top of the list. Originally made for the middlegrade age range, A Wizard of Earthsea is a beautifully deep and complex story about transitions from childhood to adulthood, learning about the harsh realities of the world, and finding the strength to perservere in incredibly difficult times. Side note that this review will likely be longer than my others because a lot of it is pulled from an essay I wrote in college.

Spoiler free summary:
The book follows the story of Ged, a powerful young wizard with a natural gift for magic and a strong dose of arrogance. Ged's journey takes him from his small village to a prestigious school for wizards. While there he gives himself the title of Sparrowhawk because, in the world of Earthsea, "true names" are used in magic to control and manipulate the world around you (e.g. knowing the true name of a particular rock in the old language will allow you to manipulate its shape).

While at the school he also forms a rivalry with a fellow student, Jasper, which ends up forever altering the course of his life and awakening a dark shadow. From this point on, Ged has a choice to either spend the rest of his life running from his shadow, or to turn and face it head on.

Review - Spoilers ahead
I originally read this book as part of a children's literature course in college (sadly not required reading, I picked it myself), so a lot of my interpretations of the book are more so from the angle of what lessons children and teens specifically might take away fom it and how it could be used in an English Lit class. To me, the main theme of this book is finding the strength and resilience to both face and eventually overcome truama. During a duel, Ged calls upon the shadow monster as an attempt to prove to Jasper once and for all that he is the more powerful wizard. Ged's arrogance, his main character flaw in the beginning of the novel, overtakes any sense when he perfroms a spell that is far too powerful for him to fully understand. The shadow attacks Ged, latching itself onto his soul and nearly killing him. The attack leaves Ged forever changed and isolated from his peers, unable to speak and with a large scar covering much of his face. I took his scar to be a pretty clear metaphor for the scar left on Ged's soul from the attack. The other students are frightened of his new face and the fact he doesn't speak, showing that the scars left by trauma can affect us far beyond the trauma itself. The effects of trauma can be complex, isolating, and confusing.

Eventually, Ged begins to recover and once he's strong enough is sent to a small village to be their wizard. There, he is far from the rest of the world and able to live a quiet life without much fear from the shadow. After some time however, Ged begins to feel the force of the shadow nearing him and he begins a long journey that spans nearly all of Earthsea as he sails from island to island trying to escape his shadow. After years of trying to escape it and risking his life to find ways to defeat the shadow once and for all, Ged reaches his breaking point and decides to turn and face the shadow head on, expecting to finally be able to fight it again. To his surprise the shadow turns and runs when it notices it's being chased. This is the turning point in the book where Ged finally finds the courage to face his shadow, his scars, his trauma head on in order to overcome it.

I absolutely loved this book because it shows that even when you feel like smallest, most frightened little creature and you wish you could (quite literally in Ged's case) grow wings and fly as far away as possible to rid of your fears it is still possible to find the strength to face them. This book is, ultimately, about understanding your inner strength and being resilient in the face of adversity.

Another aspect of this book that was one of the focuses of my college essay but I orginially omitted from this review is the diversity in the book as well as the entirety of the Earthsea series, mainly because I explained it all through a child development lens. Le Guin was very intentional in creating a world that was diverse and showcased demographics who are rarely highlighted in Western fantasy. The image I included at the beginning of this review is the cover of the edition I own and I think it does a perfect job of showing the disconnect between Le Guin's vision and intent for the series and the absolute failure of just about every reimagining and interpretation. Ged and his classmates are explicitly described as having black and brown skin, yet consistently covers depict them as white. This cover in particular also depicts a scene which never happened in the book. During the research for my essay I read interviews with Le Guin where she spoke about how important the diversity was to her and that she had children reach out to her thanking her for making it possible for them to read a fantasy story with a lead who looks like them. This is an aspect that is incredibly important in any medium and age range of storytelling, but I believe it is the most important in children's and middle-grade literature. These are foundational years where the building blocks of people's identities are shifting into place, and being able to see strong, positive depictions of characters who look like you is extremely impactful. In my mind, Le Guin's writing is some of the most important in the genre when it comes to the Western market because diversity is still a problem in fantasy today. With many American fantasy writing coming from similar backgrounds (namely Mormon, which is a faith that has a long history of racism and white supremecy no matter how many edits they make to their book to erase it) and as much as those writers can try their best to overcome biases and have representation in their writing, no one can help that the cultural environments they grew up in shape unconscious biases in their storytelling that lead a narrow depiction of fantasy. J. R. R. Tolkien is an incredibly talented and influential fantasy writer and he wrote his stories with the intention of creating a mythology for England, so of course any North American (a place that is historically and culturally heavily influenced by Europe as that's where the original colonizers came from) writers inspired by him will contribute to a largely English fantasy landscape in terms of culture. This is also why it's so important to try and broaden our horizons with translated works and books written by people who have immigrated to our countries/first-generation immigrants as they are writing with a different cultural influence than we are used to.