+++
title = "Powers (Annals of the Western Shore, #3) - Ursula K. Le Guin"
date = 2018-05-27
updated = 2021-02-12

[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "ursula k. le guin", "reviews", 
"annals of the western shore", "fantasy", "stars:5", "published:2007"]
+++

[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68020.Powers):
Young Gav can remember the page of a book after seeing it once, and,
inexplicably, he sometimes "remembers" things that are going to happen in the
future. As a loyal slave, he must keep these powers secret, but when a
terrible tragedy occurs, Gav, blinded by grief, flees the only world he has
ever known. 

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{{ stars(stars=5) }}

"The story of a boy becoming a man." 

Or "The story of a slave becoming a freeman."

Or "The story of a man traveling across its country."

All those could serve as a quick description of the story. And all of them
would be, at least, a bit wrong.

Because it's not just one of those. It's all of those. And a bit more.

At first, I was quite disappointed 'cause the "Powers" at the title are
mentioned very early and then... nothing. There is a lot of going back and
forth (a few transitions are a bit weird, like suddenly the story being a
letter to the protagonist's wife) and you keep thinking "Were the heck is this
going on?" And then, suddenly, you keep reading a bit more because you want to
see a thread closed, and then read more, and more, and more... It's quite the
same feeling I got from _Changing Planes_, although the story here is way more
complex (not quite hard, as Changing Planes is a bunch of separate stories
instead of the continuous story of a slave who runs away, make friends, finds
his people, in a span of 10 or so years).

One of the things that Le Guin impresses me is how the way she describes
things approaches the way _Isaac Asimov_ does: Describes the very minimum
necessary for the reader to understand why the characters are doing something,
and let their imagination soar with the rest. It's quite different from
_Arthur C Clarke_, which likes to over describe stuff.

In the end, it was a story that I was mostly uninterested at first but that
deeply moved me in the very end.