In the midst of Harry Potter fervor, I've been busy reading Ursula LeGuin's most recent EarthSea novels. The original EarthSea trilogy was written in late '60s and early '70s. Throughout the 1980s, LeGuin told fans that she would never write another EarthSea novel. Then, lo and behold, in 1990 Tenanu appeared, answering the most interesting question her fans had about EarthSea: Why aren't there any women wizards in EarthSea? In Tehanu she cleverly addresses sexism not just in her make-believe world, but also in the fantasy genre itself, without spoon-feeding us yet another simplistic Amazon-swordswoman novel. (Or, horror of horrors, subjecting us to more sexism ala Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose "Amazons" lived in a cloistered world separate from the rest of Darkover, thereby sparing her romanticized feudal world from having to change.)

LeGuin's next EarthSea novel, The Other Wind, was published a full decade later. It literally answers questions of life and death in EarthSea and continues to examine many of the same dualities explored in her earlier works: earth and water (humanity) vs. air and fire (dragons), life vs. afterlife, women's knowledge vs. men's "higher magic," and the attempt to control nature vs. the need to live in balance with it. And she reveals the nature and role of dragons in EarthSea, while evoking them as a symbol of the reader's yearning for magic and a connection to something beyond ourselves.

Her collection of short stories Tales From EarthSea, which should be read before the other two books, contains five nicely polished gems that fill in some of the history of EarthSea, including the founding of the school for wizards on Roke and how Ogion and his teacher stopped the earthquake on Gont. Again, LeGuin tackles themes that could keep college philosophers and English majors busy, while simultaneously making the narrative interesting for both adults and teens. It's an art that few writers can manage; LeGuin is the master.--Maria Tomchick

And here I'd like to talk for a moment about why I'm hesitant to buy and read the new Harry Potter book. Yes, I've read the previous four--it's practically impossible to escape them, if you read as much popular fiction as I do. They're entertaining, no question. They're also overly dramatic, episodic, and thematically very shallow (I'm still waiting for the Harry Potter video game to appear).

What troubles me the most about the books, however, is the overall message they give kids: that you won't necessarily succeed on your own merits, by using your intelligence or ingenuity. Think about it. Harry survives each brush with death by sheer luck and fate. He just happens to have studied the right spells earlier in the year. His friends and teachers--one of whom just happens to be an old friend of his dead father--help him out. A phoenix and a hypogriff just happen to take a liking to him. His dad leaves him an invisibility cloak. Luckily, his mama loved him so much that he has a magic aura over him that protects him. Give me a break! When I heard that JK Rowling had killed off one of the key characters in her new book, I groaned. And then I found out that Rowling told an interviewer that Harry might not survive adolescence.

What is this woman's problem? For one thing, she's got no overarching sense of the meaning or direction of life that would provide some thematic underpinning to her heavily plotted books. She writes with no sense of what she really wants to say, other than a general notion that good should triumph in the end. That's pretty thin stuff on which to base a series of seven books.

I think the real problem, however, is that she's simply sick of writing Harry Potter books and secretly wants to kill him off. The sad thing is, all these children who slavishly read and worship Harry Potter will lap up every dreadful burn-out thing she writes. Rowling needs to take a page from Ursula LeGuin's book: give Harry Potter a rest for a decade or so, and then finish the series only if she gets the urge to do so.--Maria Tomchick

My plunge into the universe of fantasy this summer has come via Michael Chabon, the Wonder Boys author who won a Pulitzer a couple of years ago for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, a sprawling novel concerning an escapee from Nazi-occupied Europe who became a famous author of superhero comic books. Chabon is back, and now he's plunged even further into the universe of teenage boys (and men who were once teenage boys) in Summerland.

Summerland, is not, as you might guess, a fictional fantasy land of never- ending summer; instead, it's the mysteriously ever-sunny end of a fictional island in the Puget Sound, somewhere northwest of Seattle. (Think the San Juans, with the climate of Sequim.) However, the reason it's sunny is that it's the close relative of a truly fictional world, Summerlands, which, along with "Winterlands" and a fourth world mysteriously closed off by Coyote eons ago, are the four branches of the tree that is the universe.

It goes from there. The protagonists -- most notably a suitably incompetent, insecure 11-year-old boy named Ethan Feld and a half-native tomboy, Jennifer T. Rideout, set off on an accidental journey to save the universe, which will end if Coyote (also known by many other names in other traditions) succeeds in ending the universe by pissing in the well that nourishes the tree.

Along the way, Chabon does a seamless job of mixing in an amazing variety of characters and stories from a wide mix of Native American and European traditions: faeries, giants, ghosts from the old West, Sasquatches, and much more. But the glue that holds it -- and the universe -- together is baseball. This, ultimately, is a fantasy journey through a universe whose defining principle (and, frequently, the deciding factor in our heroes escaping certain death) is the nine-inning game for which Little League was only the training.

This is (Jennifer T. notwithstanding; she's the only major female character) a boy's mythology, with no sexuality and, on occasion, adolescent body humor instead. But Chabon is an exceptional writer, and his novel is also a paean to a mythology much closer to the hearts of many adults -- especially those of us who played badly in Little League -- than the average wizards & sorcery fare of fantasy cliche. Don't look for any profound insights into the human condition here; the book, in fact, would be ruined if there were any. Sometimes, especially in summer, you just gotta play. --Geov Parrish