Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is the second of three volumes of the "Annals of the Western Shore" series.  It begins several years after the end of Gifts, and starts with a new main character, Memer, a young nine-year old girl growing up in a town that was defeated by religious zealots some ten years earlier, now a place where books are banned and burned, and freedoms (especially for women) are unknown. After Memer turns seventeen, Orrec and his wife Gry (of Gifts) come to town to tell stories and perform. The town is rife for rebellion, and Memer helps to bring it about. Like Gifts, this volume is an extended meditation on power and responsibility.  Voices is a more substantial book that Gifts, and both are fine achievements even if they fall short of the majesty Le Guin created in her Earthsea volumes.

Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is the first volume of a young adult trilogy that has the overall title "Annals of the Western Shore." It is a coming of age novel, about a young boy Orrec and his best friend Gry, a girl of the same age, who are both learning about their inherited "gifts"--certain magical powers that manifest along family lines. The book is also a meditation on power and its uses and abuses. It's a much softer work than Le Guin's deservedly acclaimed Wizard of Earthsea, but it's well-done and engaging. I look forward to the two remaining volumes.

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

It's really hard to believe that this book, published in 1960, could ever have been considered a great work of science fiction, but it has an entry as one in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985). The passage of time has not sat well on it. All the characters are manipulative and unpleasant people, shackled with the attitudes of the late 1950s. Worse, the characters are incompatible with the psychological drivel they spout at each other in long passages. Their expressed motivations actually do not fit their actions. And then there is the plot--most of which doesn't make any logical sense. Rogue Moon reads like a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, fleshed out a bit more into a cheezy novelization, but lacking in the zinger ending.