and unlike Curious, I'll recommend that you read the entire Earthsea
Cycle. I particularly enjoyed The Other Wind.
The Other Wind explains something that always bothered me about the
Earthsea Trilogy, that of Le Guin's depiction of the land of the dead as a
cold, dark, dry, empty land with no hope of escape or hint of hope
beyond. In The Other Wind she explains how this state of
afterlife was caused by a mistake. The redemption from this state of
death is a wonderful way she ties together all the threads of the previous
stories.
Some people, however, did not like her change in writing style from the first
three books, in that she writes more about ordinary life and her heroes are
shown to have human problems.
One other note: in her collection of esays The Wave in the Mind she
confesses her enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings stories and talks
about Tolkien being an inspiration to
her.
A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit. An allegory must be Mastery or Moorditch. A fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and sweeps you away: do you begin at once to wrestle with it and ask whence its power over you, whither it is carrying you?
~"The Fantastic Imagination" George MacDonald 1893
