The Eye of the Heron

De: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrado por: Christina Moore

From multi-award-winning, literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin comes a speculative fiction classic, The Eye of the Heron.

In Victoria on a former prison colony, two exiled groups - the farmers of Shantih and the city dwellers - live in apparent harmony. All is not as it seems, however. While the peace-loving farmers labor endlessly to provide food for the city, the city bosses rule the Shantih with an iron fist. When a group of farmers decide to form a new settlement further away, the bosses retaliate by threatening to crush the "rebellion".

Luz understands what it means to have no choices. Her father is a boss, and he has ruled over her life with the same iron fist. Luz wonders what it might be like to make her own choices. To be free to choose her own destiny.

©1978 Ursula K. Le Guin (P)2019 Recorded Books

I've always enjoyed this book.

I first read it when i was 15, it was my first time picking up a book at random and reading it cover to cover.

Great characterization, ok worldbuilding

Le Guin is always wonderful at creating characters with competing compelling, self-consistent worldviews, and drawing them into varying degrees of conflict along both obvious and less-than-obvious lines. If you chart out the mixed loyalties of all the characters, you realize that the. book should feel like a baroque novel of manners or palace intrigue. However, everything feels as simple and grounded as Wendell Berry.

The ecology of the world, though, is incongruously symbolic and dreamlike. The human characters achieve mass and three-dimensionality within a setting that should by rights generate two-dimensional caricatures, but a natural world with the potential for depth is flattened into atmosphere and symbols.

Violence Gains Nothing

“Violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing- only sometimes nothing is what people want.”

I love this author so much.

Hope is a dangerous thing to have …

This heartbreaking story is an unfettered exposé of the cruelty of control. All intentions can be pure, every action thought out, each molecule of each person can stand resolute, refusing to bend from the path of compassion and empathy … and yet, all of that can be undone in an instant. All for the sake of control and power over others. Le Guin crafts a moving cautionary tale about the terrors that accompany attempting to exert power over other people. In beautiful writing that only this true master can conjure, we are shown exactly what happens when one man decides he is superior to another.

Classic Ursula LeGuin

Subtle, sophisticated. Says a lot more about human nature and conflict than you originally realize.

Great story!

Love Le Guin. Beautiful complex story. Does not go the way you think it will.

Excellent

Short and sweet and this narrator is perfect. Not a long book but every word counts, it *feels* longer than it is. Very much enjoyed.

overly emotional reading of a good book

The story is good and thought-provoking. Narrator needs to take it down like 3 notches