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title = "Powers (Annals of the Western Shore, #3) - Ursula K. Le Guin"
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date = 2018-05-27
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updated = 2021-02-12
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "ursula k. le guin", "reviews",
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"annals of the western shore", "fantasy", "stars:5", "published:2007"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68020.Powers):
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Young Gav can remember the page of a book after seeing it once, and,
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inexplicably, he sometimes "remembers" things that are going to happen in the
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future. As a loyal slave, he must keep these powers secret, but when a
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terrible tragedy occurs, Gav, blinded by grief, flees the only world he has
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ever known.
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<!-- more -->
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{{ stars(stars=5) }}
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"The story of a boy becoming a man."
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Or "The story of a slave becoming a freeman."
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Or "The story of a man traveling across its country."
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All those could serve as a quick description of the story. And all of them
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would be, at least, a bit wrong.
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Because it's not just one of those. It's all of those. And a bit more.
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At first, I was quite disappointed 'cause the "Powers" at the title are
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mentioned very early and then... nothing. There is a lot of going back and
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forth (a few transitions are a bit weird, like suddenly the story being a
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letter to the protagonist's wife) and you keep thinking "Were the heck is this
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going on?" And then, suddenly, you keep reading a bit more because you want to
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see a thread closed, and then read more, and more, and more... It's quite the
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same feeling I got from _Changing Planes_, although the story here is way more
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complex (not quite hard, as Changing Planes is a bunch of separate stories
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instead of the continuous story of a slave who runs away, make friends, finds
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his people, in a span of 10 or so years).
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One of the things that Le Guin impresses me is how the way she describes
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things approaches the way _Isaac Asimov_ does: Describes the very minimum
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necessary for the reader to understand why the characters are doing something,
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and let their imagination soar with the rest. It's quite different from
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_Arthur C Clarke_, which likes to over describe stuff.
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In the end, it was a story that I was mostly uninterested at first but that
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deeply moved me in the very end.
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