There is nothing like poetry for getting through the occasionally dark nights of young adulthood. Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral t ranslated by Ursula K. “To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.” There is a good deal of magic, but there is also how to think about one’s parents, and cruelty, and lineage. It takes a moment to sink yourself into the world of Orrec and Gry, “a blind boy and a grim girl, sixteen years old, stuck in the superstition and squalor of the desolate hill farms and that we so grandly called our domain,” but one is quickly absorbed. Why age 9-14? Read them young and you can re-read them often.įor this age, the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy. Always, Le Guin’s eye on how humans can be better. Every page offers a solid new reality, gut-dropping and exciting twists, and new ways of seeing human behavior. Some of it is a bit grim for young readers, but we took great joy in spending the time with each of Le Guin’s scenes, and in submerging ourselves for weeks on end in the universe of Ged, Ogion, Vetch, Tenar, Lebannen, and Kalessin. To be honest, I wanted to read most of it, as they are great sentences to hold in your mouth. I recently re-read the lot of them, aloud, trading chapters, with my eldest son. But then they find each other again.”Ī pre-teen is at a fantastic age for the Wizard of Earthsea books. I don’t really like how they get lost from home. Five-year-old reviewer Rafael, who devoured the series, says: “I love the books. The books are a charm to read aloud, and you can listen to an excerpt read by the author. Jane Tabby could not explain why all four of her children had wings.” The four books focus on four cats who are born with wings.

These books are not those: Le Guin’s four Catwings books make a gentle, warm space to stretch one’s literary wings, with an eye to injustice, written in her sonorous sentences. There are characters are mean to one another for laughs. There are many contemporary books for brand-new readers that are fast, flashy, and extremely loud. Oh, how nice! It’s raining mice!”įor babies and toddlers: Cat Dreams Ages 4 to 8 “It’s fun to run / I love to leap / But now I think / I’ll go to sleep.

Voices by ursula k le guin