Powers (Annals of the Western Shore Series #3) by Ursula K. Le Guin

From the Publisher

Young Gav can remember the page of a book after seeing it once, and, inexplicably, he sometimes “remembers” things that are going to happen in the future. As a loyal slave, he must keep these powers secret, but when a terrible tragedy occurs, Gav, blinded by grief, flees the only world he has ever known. And in what becomes a treacherous journey for freedom, Gav’s greatest test of all is facing his powers so that he can come to understand himself and finally find a true home.

The Washington Post - Elizabeth Ward

As in Gifts and Voices, Le Guin's storytelling talents and dry humor shine through in Powers, leavening the somberness of its theme: the nature of power, both individual and collective, liberating and oppressive.

The Washington Post Book World

"As in Gifts and Voices, Le Guin's storytelling talents and dry humor shine through in Powers, leavening the somberness of its theme: the nature of power, both individual and collective, liberating and oppressive. After a gifted young house slave's sister is killed, he is propelled into a quest for a better life and ''a freedom we could not imagine.'' Gav's homecoming, to a place not his home, is genuinely moving."

Children's Literature

In this overwhelming novel, a boy named Gavir and his older sister are abducted at a young age and sold into slavery. As a slave, Gavir is raised to do as bidden and not to question the authority of his ruling family, who give him comfort and educate him. His sister, meanwhile, is given as a mistress to the kind and generous son of the family. Although Gavir sees shadows of bad things to come in their lives, nothing prepares him for the tragic day when he must bury his sister and leave the only home that he knows. On his own, this bewildered child grows into manhood as his life's path takes him back to where he began. Tragedy and deception become his bedfellows as he ventures into one camp after another. Then he finds the secret behind his powers. As young Gavir changes, so does his views about life and family. Author Ursula Le Guin weaves an interesting fantasy as she spins many colorful threads into this powerful book that requires a reader's complete focus. At times, the story fell flat as too many obstacles were presented for our young hero to conquer. Readers may wish to come to this book only after they have finished Gifts and Voices, the other two books from "The Annals of the Western Shore" series. This novel has disturbing and mature themes not acceptable for readers under 14 years old. Reviewer: Julia Beiker

Margaret A. ChangCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information. - School Library Journal

Gr 7 Up
Gavir, a 14-year-old slave in a noble household in Etra, one of the city-states in Le Guin's vividly imagined country, the Western Shore, is troubled by visions that may or may not foretell future events. Kidnapped in early childhood from the northern Marshes, set apart by his darker skin and hooked nose, endowed with a prodigious memory, Gavir is educated to become the scholar who will teach the family's children and their slaves. Protected by his elder sister, Gavir accepts his lot, unable to imagine any other life. Trusting his masters implicitly, he is blind to the danger that enslavement poses to his beautiful sister. When she is raped and killed by the second son of the household, Gavir walks away from the city, crazed with grief. He continues to walk for three years, passing through a wild forest into the Marshlands where he was born. He meets a variety of people along the way, some protective, some threatening, each one contributing to his quest to discover who he is and where he belongs. Hunted by an old enemy from Etra, Gavir returns to the forest to rescue a small girl he met there. In a thrilling escape sequence, he carries her to freedom. He finds a home with Orrec, Gry, and Memer, heroes of Gifts (2004) and Voices (2006, both Harcourt). Le Guin uses her own prodigious power as a writer to craft lyrical, precise sentences, evoking a palpable sense of place and believable characters. This distinguished novel belongs with its predecessors in all young adult collections.

Kirkus Reviews

Reared in slavery, Gavir knows and understands his place in the world. He has confidence that his family's older son will continue the benign rule that has allowed free and slave children to associate freely and that has encouraged the education of slaves. But with war comes chaos, and when the brutal younger son rapes and kills his beloved older sister, Gav's beliefs are rocked off their foundation and he escapes to find a more just society. Le Guin tells her story in languid fashion, accreting detail upon detail as Gav tells his tale. His powers are twofold: He can "remember" the future, although he cannot change it, and he can memorize instantly what he reads and hears. It is the latter power that sustains him, as he grows to understand the critical importance of storytelling in the lives of humans. Billed as a "companion" to Gifts (2004) and Voices (2006), in its musing on this power of story, it complements them beautifully, though readers hoping to reacquaint themselves with characters met in the first two novels will find themselves disappointed until the very end. (Fiction. YA)

What People Are Saying

School Library Journal
* “Le Guin uses her own prodigious power as a writer to craft lyrical, precise sentences, evoking a palpable sense of place and believable characters. This distinguished novel belongs with its predecessors in all young adult collections.” (starred review)

Publishers Weekly
* “This followup to Gifts (2004) and Voices (2006) may be the series’ best installment. . . . . Told with shimmering lyricism, this coming-of-age saga will leave readers as transformed by the power of words as is Gav himself. . . . Le Guin’s fans have ample reason to hope that the author may be building toward a fantasy cycle as ambitious in scope as her beloved chronicles of Earthsea.” (starred review)

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1
 
“Don’t talk about it,” Sallo tells me.
           “But what if it’s going to happen? Like when I saw the snow?”
           “That’s why not to talk about it.”
           My sister puts her arm around me and rocks us sideways, left and right, as we sit on the schoolroom bench. The warmth and the hug and the rocking ease my mind and I rock back against Sallo, bumping her a little. But I can’t keep from remembering what I saw, the dreadful excitement of it, and pretty soon I burst out, “But I ought to tell them! It was an invasion! They could warn the soldiers to be ready!”
           “And they’d say—when?”
           That stumps me. “Well, just ready.”
           “But what if it doesn’t happen for a long time? They’d be angry at you for giving a false alarm. And then if an army did invade the city, they’d want to know how you knew.”
           “I’d tell them I remembered it!”
           “No,” Sallo says. “Don’t ever tell them about remembering the way you do. They’ll say you have a power. And they don’t like people to have powers.”
           “But I don’t! Just sometimes I remember things that are going to happen!”
           “I know. But Gavir, listen, truly, you mustn’t talk about it to anybody. Not anybody but me.”
           When Sallo says my name in her soft voice, when she says, “Listen, truly,” I do truly listen to her. Even though I argue.
           “Not even Tib?”
           “Not even Tib.” Her round, brown face and dark eyes are quiet and serious.
           “Why?”           “Because only you and I are Marsh people.”
           “So was Gammy!”
           “It was Gammy that told me what I’m telling you. That Marsh people have powers, and the city people are afraid of them. So we never talk about anything we can do that they can’t. It would be dangerous. Really dangerous. Promise, Gav.”
           She puts up her hand, palm out. I fit my grubby paw against it to make the vow. “I promise,” I say as she says, “I hear.”
           In her other hand she’s holding the little Ennu-Mé she wears on a cord around her neck.
           She kisses the top of my head and then bumps me so hard I nearly fall off the end of the bench. But I won’t laugh; I’m so full of what I remembered, it was so awful and so frightening, I want to talk about it, to tell everybody, to say, “Look out, look out! Soldiers are coming, enemies, with a green flag, setting the city on fire!” I sit swinging my legs, sullen and mournful.
           “Tell me about it again,” Sallo says. “Tell all the bits you left out.”
           That’s what I need. And I tell her again my memory of the soldiers coming up the street.
           Sometimes what I remember has a secret feeling about it, as if it belongs to me, like a gift that I can keep and take out and look at when I’m by myself, like the eagle feather Yaven-dí gave me. The first thing I ever remembered, the place with the reeds and the water, is like that. I’ve never told anybody about it, not even Sallo. There’s nothing to tell; just the silvery-blue water, and reeds in the wind, and sunlight, and a blue hill way off. Lately I have a new remembering: the man in the high room in shadows who turns around and says my name. I haven’t told anybody that. I don’t need to.
           But there’s the other kind of remembering, or seeing, or whatever it is, like when I remembered seeing the Father come home from Pagadi, and his horse was lame; only he hadn’t come home yet and didn’t until next summer, and then he came just as I remembered, on the lame horse. And once I remembered all the streets of the city turning white, and the roofs turning white, and the air full of tiny white birds all whirling and flying downward. I wanted to tell everybody about that, it was so amazing, and I did. Most of them didn’t listen. I was only four or five then. But it snowed, later that winter. Everybody ran outside to see the snowfall, a thing that happens in Etra maybe once in a hundred years, so that we children didn’t even know what it was called. Gammy asked me, “Is this what you saw? Was it like this?” And I told her and all of them it was just what I’d seen, and she and Tib and Sallo believed me. That must have been when Gammy told Sallo what Sallo had just told me, not to talk about things I remembered that way. Gammy was old and sick then, and she died in the spring after the snowfall.
           Since then I’d only had the secret rememberings, until this morning.
           I was by myself early in the morning, sweeping the hall outside the nursery rooms, when I began remembering. At first I just remembered looking down a city street and seeing fire leap up from a house roof and hearing shouts. The shouts got louder, and I recognised Long Street, running north from the square behind the Forefathers’ Shrine. At the far end of the street smoke was billowing out in big greasy clouds with red flames inside them. People were running past me, all over the square, women and men, most of them running towards the Senate Square, shouting and calling out, but city guards ran by in the other direction with their swords drawn. Then I could see soldiers at the far end of Long Street under a green banner; they had long lances, and the ones on horseback had swords. The guards met with them, and there was deep shouting, and ringing and clashing like a smithy, and the whole crowd of men, a great writhing knot of armor and helmets and bare arms and swords, came closer and closer. A horse broke from it, galloping up the street straight at me, riderless, lathered with white sweat streaked red, blood running from where its eye should be. The horse was screaming. I dodged back from it. And then I was in the hall with a broom in my hand, remembering it. I was still terrified. It was so clear I couldn’t forget it at all. I kept seeing it again, and seeing more. I had to tell somebody.
           So when Sallo and I went to get the schoolroom ready and were there alone, I told her. And now I told her all over again, and telling it made me remember it again, and I could see and tell it better. Sallo listened intently and shivered when I described the horse.
           “What kind of helmets did they have?”
           I looked at the memory of the men fighting in the street.
           “Black, mostly. One of them had a black crest, like a horse’s tail.”
           “Do you think they were from Osc?”
           “They didn’t have those long wood shields like the Oscan captives in the parade. It was like all their armor was metal—bronze or iron—it made this huge clanging sound when they were fighting with the guards with swords. I think they came from Morva.”
           “Who came from Morva, Gav?” said a pleasant voice behind us, and we both jumped like puppets on strings. It was Yaven. Intent on my story, neither of us had heard him, and we had no idea how long he’d been listening. We reverenced him quickly and Sallo said, “Gav was telling me one of his stories, Yaven-dí.”
           “Sounds like a good one,” Yaven said. “Troops from Morva would march with a black-and-white banner, though.”
           “Who has green?” I asked.
           “Casicar.” He sat down on the front bench, stretching out his long legs. Yaven Altanter Arca was seventeen, the eldest son of the Father of our House. He was an officer in training of the Etran army, and away on duty much of the time now, but when he was home he came to the schoolroom for lessons just as he used to. We loved having him there because, being grown up, he made us all feel grown up, and because he was always good-natured, and because he knew how to get Everra, our teacher, to let us read stories and poems instead of doing grammar and logic exercises.
            The girls were coming in now, and Torm ran in with Tib and Hoby from the ball court, sweating, and finally Everra entered, tall and grave in his grey robe. We all reverenced the teacher and sat down on the benches. There were eleven of us, four children of the Family and seven children of the House.
           Yaven and Torm were the sons of the Arca Family, Astano was the daughter, and Sotur was their cousin.
           Among the house slaves, Tib and Hoby were boys of twelve and thirteen, I was eleven, and Ris and my sister Sallo were thirteen. Oco and her little brother Miv were much younger, just learning their letters.

Copyright © 2007 by Ursula K. Le Guin
 
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