The Compass Rose is a collection of short stories. I found it uneven and directionless, even for a collection. The stories are grouped by the points of the compass but I cannot discern much of a logic there.
A few of the stories are brilliantly alien, beautiful, way out there, looking at something familiar from an all new perspective – the kind of work I’ve come to expect from Le Guin. But the majority, while good, were not as good as her best. I was just a little bit disappointed. Of course, an average story from Le Guin is still better than what most writers manage to produce, so it was still well worth reading.
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