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Title: Who compared this to "The Lord of the Rings"?
Review: After falling in love with Middle-Earth in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", I heard that Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books were of the same caliber. Nothing could be further from the truth. This book was full of sullen, unsympathetic characters and the silliest dragons in the history of fantasy literature- dragons that you can defeat merely by calling their name. Moreover the book is obsessively concerned with the balance of magic- an interesting concept, but one which the author handles badly. The magic of Tolkien's Middle-earth is inherent in the characters- it's not what they do, but what they are. Compared to this the conflicting petty spells and name-calling in Earthsea are pretty disappointing
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