Like the movie Highlander 2, fans consider Tehanu to be a novel that doesn’t exist. The original EarthSea trilogy (A Wizard of EarthSea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore) represented a glorious and powerful work of fantasy literature, with depth of character and emotion, powerful themes, and a joy in the simple things that are the greatest mysteries.
Tehanu is a novel written explicitly to destroy everything that was good about that trilogy.
Almost 20 years after concluding the EarthSea trilogy, the author looked back on what she had written and discovered that it was a horrible, misogynistic world explicitly dominated by a male patriarchy that excluded women (“weak as women’s magic, wicked as women’s magic”) and dared to present a male character as the hero and a female character in the role of damsel in distress.
In short, it wasn’t politically correct. And so Tehanu was written to clarify the matter, for all those who read and loved the original trilogy, by destroying the characters and the world. No stone is left unturned; no way to grind the achievements and sacrifices of the characters into dust is ignored.
Unless you are a rabid man-hating feminist who read the original trilogy by accident and now seeks a way to atone for the mistake, you’ll be happier not reading this.
