BOOK REVIEW: Ursula K. Le Guin's POWERS

Ursula K. LeGuin has written some of my favorite books of all time, some classic works of science fiction that have been widely recognized with awards and showered with praised. sadly, Powers is not another one of these books.

Powers surprisingly won the 2008 Nebula Award (LeGuin's sixth!) over Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (which was the only book nominated for both major science fiction awards this year), making it a big year for YA (young adult fiction) with Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book (see MadProfessah's B- review) winning the Hugo award in a huge surprise over Neal Stephenson's Anathem and Little Brother.

Powers is the third book in a new Young Adult (YA) series Le Guin is writing called the Annals of the Western Shore.

The main character is a young boy named Gavir (or Gav) who seems to have the power of precognition; he sometimes sees events before they happen. Unfortunately, he is born in a society that is very caste-driven and includes slavery. Gav and his sister are orphaned slaves in a large plantation in a society which is in a tense stand-off with its neighboring city-states. Gav and the other young slaves are allowed to be educated and Gav is revealed to have an almost perfect eidetic memory and great scholarly potential.

The main difficulty that I had with Powers is the character of Gavir. I understand that he is young but his naivete is just simply annoying, and a bit unbelievable. Maybe readers above a certain age can't enjoy young adult fiction, but millions of adult readers of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels would disagree.

A lot of bad stuff happens to Gavir during the course of the novel, although it ends on a hopeful note with a tie-in to the earlier books in the series (which I have not read) but at this point I was simply uninterested in the story and indifferent about Gavir's future.

Paperback: 512 pages. Publisher: Harcourt Paperbacks. Date: April 6, 2009.

OVERALL GRADE: C/C+.

PLOT: C-.
IMAGERY: B-.
IMPACT: C.
WRITING: C.