This second book lacked the adventure of the first and was a bit boring - lots of descriptions, not much action - or even interaction until most of the way through the book. Hoping that book 3 is a bit better. ( )

The second book of the Earthsea Cycle introduces us to Tenar, The Eaten One, or the high priestess of the Nameless Ones. Tenar was selected at birth to hold this position and she loves to do so until the wizard Ged appears.

Ged is there to rob the secret vaults of the Nameless Ones to find a ring that is rumored to help restore peace. Tenar discovers Ged when he enters the underground tunnels she loves to be in.

A nice second book to the series, and it also sets up the third (almost done with it) quite well. I wish we were able to see more of Ged's life inbetween the books, but the glimpses of his life that the books do show us are fascinating. ( )

As a child I didn't like this book as much as the first, not quite anyway, because I wanted to know more about Sparrowhawk growing up, not about this strange man who seems to have been off having more adventures without me knowing about it. But Tenar's story is powerful too, and appeals to me more now as an adult. This story has a different magic to the first, but still very powerful. ( )

Occasionally there's this difficulty in knowing how to rate things when they're parts of a whole and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. On its own, The Tombs of Atuan is a stunning, sombre little piece of fantasy--a Bildungsroman about a girl selected Dalai Lama-fashion to be high priestess of this death cult and raised cloistered and twisted, until a stranger comes into her life and teaches her how to walk away and start life anew. Gives her herself back. It's a parable about hate and healing and feeling guilty and broken and finding a way, not to love yourself, or not right away, but to start again even though you don't love yourself and move away from what happened, for which the fault was none of yours. It's a story that I can very easily imagine speaking to victims of sexual abuse, child soldiers, the innocent and damaged.

And then you slap it up against A Wizard of Earthsea, and it is certainly inventive in the ways that book is generic, and its characters are certainly psychologically real--Ged in particular seems as if he has stepped out of the pages of history or legend and come alive. But it doesn't have that mythic sweep--Wizard is a timeless story that you can imagine coming out of an unfamiliar mythology, but Tombs is decidedly and defiantly modern. In some ways it's an uneasy mix, and I wonder if Le Guin changed the way she wanted to go with the series--the first book is like a chronicle, the second one like a thriller, and the first one deals in dragons and gebbeths, whereas in this book the Nameless Ones are never directly seen--we feel them only through Tenar and Ged's reactions, and of course that plays up the fact that they are your own fears--as opposed to Ged's shadow in the first book, which is his dark ambition but also a beast with four taloned legs and no face. The indirectness is very, very effective, but it also plays up the genre clash, and I'm curious if/how Le Guin is going to resolve it in The Farthest Shore. ( )