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    Powers
    Powers
    Powers
    Audiobook13 hours

    Powers

    Written by Ursula K. Le Guin

    Narrated by Andy Paris

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel: A young man tries to come to grips with his strange gifts as he sets out on a dangerous journey.

    Brought up in comfort as a house slave for a great family, young Gavir can recall the page of a book after seeing it once. Sometimes he even “remembers” things that are going to happen in the future—a power Gav cannot explain or control, and one that his beloved older sister wisely advises him to keep secret. But when tragedy destroys his trust in all he has ever known, he flees in blind grief, setting off on a treacherous journey towards a goal he does not understand. Is Gav seeking freedom? Or his own people? Then there is the greatest mystery of all: the true use of his powers.

    “This follow-up to Gifts and Voices may be the series’ best installment,” raved Booklist, while the Toronto Star praised Le Guin for “her facility in world making and her interest in human nature” in “a good, long trek of a fantasy.”

    Shortlisted for a Locus Award, the third book of the Annals of the Western Shore is an epic story of survival and self-discovery that brings its hero home at last to a place where he has never been before.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 6, 2008
    ISBN9781428199491
    Author

    Ursula K. Le Guin

    Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

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    Reviews for Powers

    4/5

    242 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      UKLG is one of the greatest writers ever. Fact.
    • 5/5
      I think I would read this a different way the second time. I trusted the narrator so much that I made many discoveries with him, even about the treatment of women and slaves. If I had read more critically, I would have been able to see the flaws in his views. As it was, there were only a couple of times that something that seemed fine to him seemed off to me - the general idea of slavery, and the women in the runaway camp. I think that's a positive reflection on this book, though, because a central theme was trust and who to trust and what criteria to use for trusting someone. As with LeGuin's Lavinia, which fixated on the concept of piety, no clear answers are given. She just raises a lot of questions, and she does so in an authentic way through the story of single individual's coming of age.

      Of the trilogy, this book had the most dramatic tension, especially towards the end. That served to make the end even more satisfying, but I think it would be stressful to read again.

      I'm fascinated by women authors who include physical violence and war as central themes. When I was younger, I read a lot of Tamora Pierce (and am rereading it now). I understand that when civilization as we know it is gone, physical strength is the most important kind of strength, and I do cheer with Alanna and Kel when they completely massacre the enemy. But I feel weird about it, just as I felt weird about the appearance of war in all three of these books.

      Along with war come the concepts of cruelty and evil. Our narrator limited our understanding of Hoby and Torm through his youth and his particular perspective, but Hoby never made sense to me. Torm sounded like he was mentally ill, but Hoby just sounded sadistic. I don't know if that was simply how Gav saw him or if that's how he really was, but LeGuin is a smart writer, and I'm sure she intended to make us question Gav's narration.

      As with all LeGuin's books, the writing was superb.

      SPOILER:

      I'm still really concerned about Melle's sister. I know it's unrealistic that they would rescue her, but in my mind, that's what they do as soon as Gavir is made a citizen.
    • 5/5
      I read this with the audiobook, and the performance is very good. I’d recommend the entire series in this format (NB: it’s a different performer for each book). Other reviews have said this is the best book of the series/trilogy, and I’d agree with that. Each book has its own complex ethical and social question, but this one was the most striking for me. In a Roman-seeming slave holding society, the protagonist grows up as a captured slave, and there’s a tension running through the book over whether he’ll become a part of a slave rebellion or take some other path. In part, for YA readers, this is raising questions for American history through a more distant setting, but as Le Guin does, she also depicts the misogyny and authoritarianism of the potential rebel leader. This grabs after themes across her oeuvre, such as the role of the university in the ending of the book, the importance of the literary word to the individual’s search for freedom, and the relationship between a spiritual practice and political action. Le Guin never gives an easy answer, and while the YA nature of this book and the series means that some of the resolutions avoid the kind of distress that appears in her other works, they’re also not easy. Here, the young man eventually finds his place in the world (this happens in the previous two books as well), but we don’t have any equally easy resolution to the problem of slavery in the society nor how revolutionary change might usher in new conflicts.
    • 3/5
      This final book in the ‘trilogy’ of related stories (previous characters only enter briefly) is similar in melancholy frustrated tone to the others. I didn’t find any of them an easy read due to the pervading sadness and relatively slow action. Gavir is a well-treated house slave who doesn’t question his life until terrible events send him wandering and looking for purpose. He has an untrained power to glimpse visions of the future, but I don’t feel like this impacts the story much at all - it would be the same novel if there was no magic in the world. Running through all books are themes of the importance of stories and the written word, the power that people have over each other, and ties to family and place.
    • 4/5
      One of those books I didn't want to come to the end of. Absorbing characters and a detailed, interesting world. I loved the exploration of freedom and slavery in this one.
    • 3/5
      A book for young readers. Prizewinner.
    • 4/5
      This is a pretty straight-ahead Ursula Le Guin fantasy Bildungsroman in a relatively generic picturesque medieval setting, about emancipating yourself from slavery and learning how to cope with freedom, understanding yourself and your capabilities, and finding a place you belong. It's a lot more literal than the Jungian indulgences of Earthsea, a YA novel with lots of good old common sense to say, overtly, to you and me at any age where we're still trying to live authentically, make it all make sense, and/or soothe our heart.
    • 5/5
      The third book in The Annals of the Western Shore is amazingly good. Le Guin is on top of her game, exploring slavery and its reverberations. It's excellent in every way. And it includes this transcendent piece, which caused me to catch my breath and blink away tears:
      "To look back on that summer and the summers after it is like looking across the sea to an island, remote and golden over the water, hardly believing that one lived there once. Yet it's still here within me, sweet and intense: the smell of dry hay, the endless shrill chant of crickets on the hills, the taste of a ripe, sun-warmed, stolen apricot, the weight of a rough stone in my hands, the track of a falling star through the great summer constellations."

      ETA: 1/29/08- Listened to the audio, and stand by the five star review. This is a phenomenal book.
    • 4/5
      And now I want to read the others in this apparent trilogy, which escaped my attention when they first came out. This has some of the more poignant themes that Le Guin tends to deal with; journeys and coming of age and finding one's true place. The end of the book was far more to my liking than the first, though I can't defend that.
    • 4/5
      Annals of the Western Shores--whether it's a now-complete trilogy or the beginning of a longer series--covers weighty issues in each volume, but never becomes preachy or message-driven. The focus of Gifts was primarily on the morality of ones' talents and how they should be used; Voices set up the religious elements of the world. Now, in Powers, we're visiting a third geographic region of the Western Shores and exploring themes of identity, compassion, and what it means to go home.

      I'm finding I like this series more and more, the further we get from Orrec and Gry. LeGuin's talents lie in world-building over character development--I never come away from one of her books feeling that I've gotten to know the protagonist so much as used him as a vehicle to understand the world he lives in. Powers is no exception, but for the first time in this series, I've finally come to understand, to fall into, the world setting LeGuin has created. I don't know if this is because the other two were just too brief (this volume clocks in at 500 pages; 150 more than Voices and 200 more than Gifts) and she needed more space to play, or if there's something about this particular region that appealed to me more.
    • 5/5
      'Gifts', 'Voices' and 'Powers', as well as being linked by sharing geography and key characters, are together an exploration of what exactly constitutes magic and magical abilities. 'Gifts' showed two individuals, Orrec and Gry, developing talents that could equally be regarded as non-magical in our own world, namely storytelling, poetry and empathy with animals. 'Voices' focused on Memer, whose apparent gift of prophecy actually called into doubt that oracles, with their ambiguous messages, could actually foretell the future: were they not just a reflection of human attempts to make sense of gnomic utterances?And now we come to 'Powers', the third and possibly the last of the Annals of the Western Shore. Here we meet Gavir who has random vivid but obviously accurate remembrances of future events that will happen to him, which naturally trouble him, probably as a result of his genetic make-up. While this is a trigger to much of Gavir's actions and motivation, Le Guin is equally if not more interested in Gavir's complementary talent, the talent of photographic memory which enables him to easily recall what he has read. And it is a talent that contributes in no small measure to the course of Gavir's young life. In a sense, too, this novel is also about the power we humans can wield over others less powerful than ourselves--slaves, women, children, the weak--and the fluid boundaries that come into existence when inequalities of power veer between the benign and the abusive.While 'Gifts' had a relatively small geographic range (the Uplands of the Western Shore) and 'Voices' was confined to the city of Ansul (in the far south of the Western Shore) 'Powers' has a correspondingly larger canvas, visiting more landscapes (the city state of Etra, wilder forests and marshland, the free city of Mesun) and occupying more pages than its predecessors. This is only fitting for perhaps the most intense of the three volumes in which Le Guin feels free to do what she is exceptionally good at, the visiting of the great issues of love, learning and liberty linked firmly to characters that you care about. Added to her background in poetry and interest in anthroplogy is her own gift, her power of sympathetic storytelling, her distinctive narrative voice that makes her one of the most consummate authors that I can think of.
    • 5/5
      The third book in the Annals of the Western Shore series, after Gifts and Voices. This one tells the story of a slave boy who, well-treated and educated, grows up content with his lot until tragedy forces him to confront the injustice of his life. It's a good book, much longer and more complex than Gifts, but while it is sometimes rather moving and occasionally suspenseful, I didn't find it quite as compelling as Voices.It occurs to me, by the way, that "Powers" might have made an equally good title for the series as a whole, as he trilogy really is an extended exploration of various kinds of power, although never a simplistic or didactic one. I do love Le Guin's ability to blend deep themes and plain good storytelling so perfectly.
    • 4/5
      Though I didn't personally like it, Powers is a strongly written 500 page epic telling the tale of Gavir, a boy sold into slavery. Unlike most people in his postion, Gavir is content enough with his life until he realizes he has the power to see into the future. This coming of age story is a suitable for readers who like fantasy books where the characters further develop through self awareness. This is the third of the Annals of the Western Shore series.
    • 5/5
      best of the series.
    • 5/5
      Strong themes in this book include slavery, trust, equality, learning, power - typical Le Guin, I'd say. The story of Gavir, a learned slave who can remember things that haven't happened yet, is a tribute to story-tellers and an interesting point of view to an interesting society.Annals of the Western Shores has been an interesting series, and this third part (after Gifts and Voices) is my favourite of them all. The series is marketed as young adult literature and that's what the first two parts are, but this is less so - any adult should be able to appreciate this (I did enjoy Gifts and Voices as well).