Just finished reading
Tehanu; the fourth book in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Chronicles.
Let's assume someone served you the most delicious lasagne. You picked your way through the dish, savouring every bit of it, and with the last spoonful of it, bit into a whole peppercorn, the bitter taste of it flooding your mouth and ruining, or somewhat hampering, your enjoyment of the meal.
Tehanu is that peppercorn for me. I read the first three books during my spare time in a week, enjoying the beautiful characters, the otherworldy tone, the simple yet complex wisdom and the
magic of it all; it was quite solidly high-fantasy fiction, in every way. Then, seventeen years after the third book, along came a gritty, introspective,
real and
bitter treatise on feminism and child abuse
packaged as the final book in the high-fantasy series. The only things about Tehanu that linked it to the trilogy were the characters and the places within the book. She couldn't have penned it as a separate book; she
had to have it ride Earthsea's coattails.
I always found those people who ranted passionately about filmmakers 'ruining their memories' of certain movies, with unnecessary remakes and sequels, to be a bit
melodramatic but I now know exactly how they feel. I loved the Earthsea trilogy (I refuse to see this book as part of it) but find my recollection of it to now be somewhat tainted. Frankly, I'm quite mad and sad about it.