She takes care of him until he's healthy. Ged arrives on the back of a dragon fresh from the events of The Farthest Shore, injured and having lost his magical power. Tenar receives word that Ogion (Ged's mentor from the earlier books) is dying and wishes to see her.

Her children are grown but she has adopted a girl she calls Therru, who was burned by her cruel father. Decades after the events of The Tomb of Atuan, Tenar finds herself widowed after choosing a quiet farm life of marriage and children.

Tehanu upends the genre again by focusing on a middle-aged woman living a normal (mostly non-magical) life. It doesn't have to be about young boys (or young Hobbits) going on quests, or even if it is, as in A Wizard of Earthsea, it doesn't have to take place in a Manichean moral universe with Medieval European roots. Fantasy doesn't have to be this way, though, as Le Guin and a few others, most recently and especially N. Tolkien did it a lot better than his many imitators.

I generally like science fiction better than fantasy because fantasy is often more limited by its genre conventions. There's more going on in Tehanu, the fourth Earthsea book, than I can really get to in this review (as with most Le Guin novels), but I can say it really helped to read Le Guin's 2012 afterword in my edition. I recently moved these two later books in the series - Tehanu and Tales From Earthsea-to the top of my list to prepare for an online discussion of the Earthsea books (info here). I've been a huge fan of Le Guin's science fiction for about 20 years, but I didn't start reading the Earthsea books until a few years ago.

Ursula k le guin tehanu