Earthsea

I have finished the first two Earthsea novels by Ursula LeGuin, so I'm combining them into a mega-post.

This book, The Wizard of Earthsea, is something of a fantasy classic, and it is indeed pretty good. The story follows Ged, a young kid who has an affinity for magic. He heads off to magic school (quite similar to Hogwarts) because he wants to become powerful in a hurry. While he does advance quickly, he gets too big for his britches and casts an overly advanced spell which unleashes some malevolent being. Most of the book involves Ged's dealing with the consequences of that spell.

The Tombs of Atuan follows in the series. Instead of focusing on Ged, it revolves around a girl who is sort of coerced into being a priestess at age 12, but she becomes disillusioned about her religion. Ged shows up after a while to first antagonize her, but later to help her figure things out.

Note to authors: if you've written an excellent book with a compelling main character, don't focus the sequel on someone entirely new and more boring. I was all excited to be getting back to Ged with Tombs, but he didn't appear until more than halfway through the novel. Because of this, I spent half of the book wishing things would move along and more excitement would happen. I'll probably keep going with this series, but Tombs has probably spoiled the rest of it for me.