Four ways to forgiveness Stories

Review by Booklist Review

A new Le Guin that returns us to her popular Hainish realm is an event worth celebrating, especially when it is a richly textured speculation on humanity's distant future among the stars that insightfully mirrors its recent past. The backdrops here are twin planets--Yeowe has been devastated by wars of liberation from slavery under Werel--and the surrounding galactic civilization of the Ekumen. Four loosely connected novellas follow the ordeals of various natives and visitors to the planets: a reclusive spinster on Yeowe becomes nursemaid to a disgraced revolutionary; a planet-hopping "space brat" forms an unlikely bond with a Werelian soldier; an adventuresome youth's disillusionment with his native Hain provokes him to help destitute Yeowans; and an illiterate former slave girl rises to a position of leadership. Le Guin relates each protagonist's plight and fateful outcome with a masterly command of characterization and fascinating cultural detail. Fans of her Hainish novels won't want to miss these stories. --Carl Hays

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Most of Le Guin's recent fiction divides into collections of stories bound by theme, such as Searoad, or novels such as the Nebula Award-winning Tehanu, in which the author has revisited worlds she created decades before. This volume is a hybrid: a theme collection featuring the Hainish culture that informed, among other works, Le Guin's celebrated The Left Hand of Darkness. The four interrelated novellas presented here deal with the quest to achieve true liberation on the planets Werel and Yeowe (which are detailed in extensive endnotes). Le Guin focuses on the situation of women, who remain in a subservient position even after civil and interplanetary wars have provided ``freedom for all men.'' Both sexes are treated with more balance here than in Searoad: the women are occasionally ignoble, while the men are shown in complex, but generally positive, lights. Each of these stories is mindful that achieving ``the one noble thing'' requires a mutual respect between the sexes. In contrast to the stridency of Searoad, Le Guin has muted her tone here, achieving both greater resonance and power as she offers an accessible, educational and ecumenical look at the interrelationship among love, freedom and forgiveness. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

The latest work by one of sf's most gifted and perceptive writers offers four connected novellas (previously published in periodicals) that explore the hidden territories of the human heart. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by School Library Journal Review

YA‘"Hold fast to the one noble thing." LeGuin skillfully weaves this theme throughout the four novellas. Fraught with warring factions of "assets" and "owners," this book is more philosophical than it is futuristic. Although the planets of Werel and Yeowe are more technologically advanced than our Earth of today, the complex issues involving race relations, sexism, and class divisions mirror those of our own culture. Corrupt politicians, runaway slaves, proud military leaders, and naive foreign emissaries struggle to maintain their humanity in a seemingly hopeless world. By the end of each of the novellas, the main characters gain some peace of mind and have somehow changed the world (if only minutely) for the better. For YAs who have ever felt "closed in" by society or their parents, LeGuin's book is a wonderful choice, particularly for female readers as most of the characters are women and the focus is on women's rights. While describing the deleterious effects of civil war, the author conveys understanding as well as a sense of self-importance. Notes and history of the two planets are appended.‘Ginger Armstrong, Chesterfield County Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

Four connected long stories from Le Guin (A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, 1994, etc.) featuring the planets Yeowe and Werel, the latter a slave-owning oligarchy, the former its colony. Contact by the wise, multi-planet space civilization, the Ekumen, lends impetus to revolutions on both worlds. The slaves of Yeowe oust their brutal Bosses after a savage seven-year struggle; later, the slaves of Werel rise up to topple their Owners. But on Yeowe the women discover that they have overthrown the Bosses only to be oppressed by their own menfolk; and so begins their slow but implacable fight for equality. In ``Betrayals,'' the disgraced but enlightened revolutionary Abberkam finds redemption in his burgeoning love for the teacher Yoss. ``Forgiveness Day'' tells the tale of Solly, the Envoy of the Ekumen of Werel, who, at the beginning of the slaves' revolt, is kidnapped and imprisoned with punctilious but honorable soldier Teyeo, her bodyguard. Havzhiva of Hain, Solly's assistant, is ``A Man of the People'' who helps the women of Yeowe with their own nonviolent revolution. And ``A Woman's liberation'' is narrated by Radosse Rakam, born a slave on Werel, eventually to become instrumental in the women's revolution on Yeoweand Havzhiva's beloved. Whether constructing a moving and expressive love story, or articulating the feminist subtext, there is no more elegant or discerning expositor than Le Guin.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

Four Ways to Forgiveness Stories Betrayals "On the planet 0 there has not been a war for five thousand years," she read, "and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly, not gobble words down in chunks the way Tikuli gulped his food. "There has never been a war": in her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes, thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities. Tikuli, sleeping curled up around his tail in the weak sunshine, sighed as if imitating her, and scratched a dreamflea. Gubu was out in the reeds, hunting; she could not see him, but now and then the plume of a reed quivered, and once a marsh hen flew up cackling in indignation. Absorbed in a description of the peculiar social customs of the Ithsh, she did not see Wada till he was at the gate letting himself in. "Oh, you're here already," she said, taken by surprise and feeling unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right thing for her after all. "Come on in," she said, getting up and dropping her book and picking it up and feeling her back hair where the knot was coming loose. "I'll just get my bag and be off, then." "No hurry," the young man said in his soft voice. "Eyid won't be here for a while yet." Very kind of you to tell me I don't have to hurry to leave my own house, Yoss thought, but said nothing, obedient to the insufferable, adorable selfishness of the young. She went in and got her shopping bag, reknotted her hair, tied a scarf over it, and came out onto the little open porch. Wada had sat down in her chair; he jumped up when she came out. He was a shy boy, the gentler, she thought, of the two lovers. "Have fun," she said with a smile, knowing she embarrassed him. "I'll be back in a couple of hours -- before sunset." She went down to her gate, let herself out, and set off the way Wada had come, along the path up to the winding wooden causeway across the marshes to the village. She would not meet Eyid on the way. The girl would be coming from the north on one of the bogpaths, having left the village at a different time and in a different direction than Wada, so that nobody would notice that for a few hours every week or so the two young people were gone at the same time. They were madly in love, had been in love for three years, and would have lived in partnership long since if Wada's father and Eyid's father's brother hadn't quarreled over a piece of reallocated Corporation land and set up a feud between the families that had so far stopped short of bloodshed, but put a love match out of the question. The land was valuable; the families, though poor, each aspired to be leaders of the village. Nothing would heal the grudge. The whole village took sides in it. Eyid and Wada had nowhere to go, no skills to keep them alive in the cities, no tribal relations in another village who might take them in. Their passion was trapped in the hatred of the old. Yoss had come on them, a year ago now, in each other's arms on the cold ground of an island in the marshes -- blundering onto them as once she had blundered onto a pair of fendeer fawns holding utterly still in the nest of grass where the doe had left them. This pair had been as frightened, as beautiful and vulnerable as the fawns, and they had begged her "not to tell" so humbly, what could she do? Four Ways to Forgiveness Stories . Copyright © by Ursula Le Guin. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---