This story felt like a wholesome story about a loving family in a good neighborhood of ‘people’… until you read it more than once. There were a lot of things that kind of had me tilting my head in curiosity about the details that were engraved between the lines throughout the reading. It seemed like the husband had a wife who adored him and everything that he is. It was continuing well enough until the moon and the cursed blood line of the husband started getting discussed. I was getting curious, eventually the full moon came up, and the husband started developing longer legs while the face started getting flatter. Eventually it was clear that he was transforming into a human… and the wife was never human.
Stories like these are straight out of folklore, yet they’re interesting because it isn’t so blatantly obvious at first. Le Guin was able to keep my interest pretty easily with how the text flowed. It wasn’t packed with enough details to put someone to sleep, but it was enough to build the movie in the mind as you kept on reading. My question is, what led Le Guin to creating a story surrounding a shapeshifter and his family?
I wonder where Le Guin got the idea for this story from. Werewolves are everywhere in storytelling, but there had to have been some kind of starting point. Maybe they read a children’s story about werewolves, or maybe they thought up the twist first. Either way, I don’t think we’ll find out.
This author was also able to keep my interest throughout the story because I kept wondering what was going to happen next. Even when the story ended I still wanted to know more such as how the wife and children continued their lives and what the wife told the children about their father.
The story definitely got a little off once you hit the right part. I found my self asking questions like, “Why did their child turn against the husband?” or “Why didn’t the wife tell her sister sooner?” There were a lot fo weird components to the story that’s going to remain unanswered.