Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Summary
Tenar, who was a priestess of the Tombs of Atuan as a girl and left with Ged and the ring, did not become a wizard or a queen. She married a farmer on Gont, raised two children, buried her husband, and is now a middle aged widow called Goha with a farm to run.
She takes in a child who has been raped, beaten and pushed into a fire by the people who were travelling with her, and who has lost an eye and the use of one hand. The child is called Therru. Most people on Gont cannot look at her.
Ged arrives soon after, brought by a dragon, unconscious and stripped of every scrap of power he had, having spent it all in the previous book. He is not a hero any more, cannot be one again, and has to work out what a man is when the thing he was famous for is gone.
The book that follows is about goats, dishes, firewood, gossip, a hostile neighbour, and the specific vulnerability of two women and a damaged child in a place where nobody with authority will intervene. The magic, when it finally arrives, arrives from Therru.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, quiet, domestic and much angrier than it looks.
It came eighteen years after the original trilogy and deliberately reopens it, and readers who wanted more of the same have never entirely forgiven it. Best for readers who want Le Guin arguing with her own earlier books in public.
Historical Context & Significance
Tehanu won the 1990 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and made Ursula K. Le Guin the first writer to win the Nebula for Best Novel three times, after The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
It arrived eighteen years after The Farthest Shore and was subtitled The Last Book of Earthsea, which turned out not to be true. She returned twice more, with the stories of Tales from Earthsea and the novel The Other Wind in 2001.
The reception split the readership. Critics generally treated it as the strongest book in the sequence and as Le Guin's direct answer to the male centred heroism of the original trilogy, in which women barely appear and the school at Roke admits only boys. A significant part of the audience that had grown up with those books found the shift to domestic life and to a heroine in her forties a betrayal, and said so for years.