Clark, Ginger and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at. GIFTS has the simplicity of fairy tale and the power of myth GUARDIANLe Guin is a writer of phenomenal power OBSERVEROrrec, the son of the Brantor of. “Gifts” doesn’t talk directly about nurturance, although the two young people at its center are shown to be attuned to each other, and there is some gruffly attuned parenting as well.Īn uneasy, thought-provoking read, with layers. Gifts (Annals of the Western Shore) by Le Guin, Ursula K. Other families’ gifts include turning people blind or deaf, twisting their limbs, enslaving their minds, and afflicting them with a slow wasting death.

In her essay, Nora Samaran uses “Gifts” as an example of needing to look at something backwards, violence vs. One family’s gift is calling to animals, which can be helpful when you’re training a horse or a dog, but is oftener used to deadly effectin the hunt. What if, eventually, there is less destructiveness and we have more options than we thought. What if the people around us are doing the best they can with their destructiveness and lack of resources. What if we lose what really matters to us. The Caspro gift is the worst and best of all. The Callems can move heavy things - even buildings, even hills. What if the best we can do with destructiveness inside us is do nothing, hold still, for a really long time. The Rodds can send a spellknife into a mans heart. Then it feels irritatingly complex with not enough answers to hard questions. To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. At first it feels irritatingly simplistic and aimed at young readers, but with not enough happening. 9,970 ratings, 3.75 average rating, 944 reviews.

Recommended to me by: Referenced in The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture blog post.

Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin