Unlocking the Air

Unlocking the Air: Stories
Ursula K. Le Guin

Summary (with spoilers):
Not a complete summary, but here are a few of the stories I enjoyed.

"Limberlost" - A novelist ventures to a writing convention in the wilderness, which she later realizes is in the same location as a camp she visited as a girl, and has a conversation with a poet.

"Ether, OR" - This story switches between many point-of-view characters, all who live in or near the town of Ether, which keeps shifting location. Much of it is centered around a woman who works in a grocery store and has had several husbands. There's a girl who wants to be a truck driver, and a farmer.

"Unlocking the Air" - Follows the actions of a mother and daughter living in a country in rebellion. The title refers to the practice of shaking keys in the air during a protest.

"Daddy's Big Girl" - Jewel Ann grows to be 45 feet tall!

"Olders" - One of the only stories in this collection with a fantasy feel. A doctor accompanies a wounded man back to his home island. The man never wakes from his comma, but instead begins to turn into a tree, as is common for people of his line.

"The Poacher" - A different telling of "Sleeping Beauty." A peasant boy finds a giant thicket of thorn bushes, and after years of hacking his way to the middle, he finds a castle and grounds where everyone is in an enchanted sleep. He spends his life there, knowing that one day a prince may come to break the enchantment, because the enchantment is not there for him.

My Thoughts:
It's difficult to critique a book of short stories that were published in previous publications (and not written with the idea of a cohesive collection in mind.) Although written with the skill of a master writer, many of these stories didn't grab me as Le Guin's science fiction tends to do. I came to the end of several stories feeling that I hadn't gained much from them, although all were well crafted. A good example of this is one of my least favorite stories in the collection, "The Professor's Houses," which describes a professor's hobby of building doll houses and furniture. It felt to me that this story was trying too hard to be "literary" and didn't present any interesting ideas.

I did enjoy many of the stories, especially those with a more fantasy bent. Le Guin writes with a style that I love; she makes me feel as if I am experiencing those worlds, as if I am embodying, not so much the characters, but the places she describes. It's one of the reasons she's my favorite author.

In the last story in the book, "The Poacher," when the boy makes it through to the other side of the thorns to reveal a castle, it was as if I too had broken through a thicket, because it was only then that I remembered I had read this story at a younger age, perhaps 13 or 14. It's always strange reading a story you read years before, especially if you last read it as a child.