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psydneigh's review
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Takes place during Ender’s Game, but follows Bean. It felt like a betrayal almost to listen to Bean think negatively about Ender after following Ender for his whole series. This one didn’t hold my attention too well.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child death and War
amy_joy's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death
Moderate: Child abuse, Bullying, Murder, and Abandonment
athenaminerva13's review
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death and War
bravokidroxy's review
adventurous
dark
hopeful
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
This is the same story as Enders Game but it’s told fun Bean, the other chosen one, the spare for incase Ender couldn’t do it. Bean was an orphan toddler on the streets of Rotterdam and he gout out by being the perfect, most precocious, most intelligent three year old you’ve ever met. The story sticks with it tho, as he grows into his mind and puzzles out the amazing, terrible things that are happening in Battle School, in the war, in politics. There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief you have to do to get into it but Bean’s trajectory never fails to make me cry in Part 5 and beyond.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism and Bullying
Moderate: Child abuse, Child death, and Murder
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Medical content, and Pedophilia
I find it so hard to hate these books. I know Enders Game is horrible and homophobic and gross and I can see the ableism and backhanded corrections in this book. Add on top of that OSC’s politics and nobody should really be reading these books. And yet here I am because They are complex and painful and reflective about the state of humanity (not a lot but a little) and I’ve been reading them since I was 11. So you should probably stay away if you aren’t already sucked into this world.booksthatburn's review against another edition
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
Ender's Shadow takes a minor (but memorable) character from Ender's Game and fills out his story in a cool way. Unfortunately it did so by ramping up ableism until it is inextricable from the premise, the plot, and two of the main characters.
Review CW for quoting ableist language from the text.
For those of you who still like this series, I understand why, I used to love it too. When I first discovered this series I actually read Ender's Shadow before I read Ender's Game. I read it over and over because I needed something in it. Something that understood how much adult pressure I was under while still a child, how much I felt too old for my skin while being expected to be brilliant. There's a lot of ways that this book speaks to kids who, for whatever reason, are pushed to grow up too quickly. The writing is pretty good and the main character is complex (but the narrative does a bit more "tell" than "show", often explaining very complex thought processes rather than doing something with them). For a long time there's little focus on other kids in the school because, frankly, Bean is mainly interested in just one kid, Ender, only really making a friend with anyone late in the story. By contrast, Ender's Game is full of complex interactions with the other kids because Ender is a very different child from Bean.
Because this takes place during approximately the same time as Ender's Game and spends much of it in the same location with the same people, it had the challenge of not contradicting what came before but also bringing new things to the same story. In that, it does a good job. In between writing Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, the author seems to have learned that perhaps it wasn't a good idea to fill the pages with a homophobic slur and constantly identify everyone by stereotypes about their countries or nicknames based on being unable to say their real names properly, so instead of constantly saying "Buggers" we have adults gently "reminding" each other that their enemies are more properly called the "Formics", and there's a conversation where a minor character with a bad nickname tells Bean that he doesn't want anyone using that name anymore.
As much as I loved them once, I won't recommend this book or the series ever again. Just as much of the language and plot in Ender's Game was inextricable from homophobia, this book and its ableism can't be separated without the whole thing coming down. The main antagonist to Bean is Achilles, named because of some unspecified deformity in one of his legs. He is driven to destroy anyone who has seen him in a position of weakness. And... yeah that's his motivation. He begins life disabled in an environment where weakness will get you killed, manages to survive, but hates anyone who looks down on him for any reason, including but not limited to thinking of him as subordinate or unable to do something. But even that "disabled villain" trope isn't the main ableism here. We find out about halfway through the book that a certain character only exists because someone was inspired by the existence autistic people, described in the text as "idiot savants", to experiment on embryos to try and unlock savant levels of intelligence (or greater, if possible). When describing the inspiration for the experiment the book repeats a string of harmful (and untrue) stereotypes about autistic people and uses slurs I will not repeat here. While the person describing this experiment is cast as a kind of villain, his theories are understood to be correct and he's only reviled for carrying them out. This is a story about adults exploiting children, built on several kinds of ableism, and as much as I loved this book before I understood how harmful it was, I don't recommend it. If you missed this bit of the sci-fi canon you don't need to go back for it.
Review CW for quoting ableist language from the text.
For those of you who still like this series, I understand why, I used to love it too. When I first discovered this series I actually read Ender's Shadow before I read Ender's Game. I read it over and over because I needed something in it. Something that understood how much adult pressure I was under while still a child, how much I felt too old for my skin while being expected to be brilliant. There's a lot of ways that this book speaks to kids who, for whatever reason, are pushed to grow up too quickly. The writing is pretty good and the main character is complex (but the narrative does a bit more "tell" than "show", often explaining very complex thought processes rather than doing something with them). For a long time there's little focus on other kids in the school because, frankly, Bean is mainly interested in just one kid, Ender, only really making a friend with anyone late in the story. By contrast, Ender's Game is full of complex interactions with the other kids because Ender is a very different child from Bean.
Because this takes place during approximately the same time as Ender's Game and spends much of it in the same location with the same people, it had the challenge of not contradicting what came before but also bringing new things to the same story. In that, it does a good job. In between writing Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, the author seems to have learned that perhaps it wasn't a good idea to fill the pages with a homophobic slur and constantly identify everyone by stereotypes about their countries or nicknames based on being unable to say their real names properly, so instead of constantly saying "Buggers" we have adults gently "reminding" each other that their enemies are more properly called the "Formics", and there's a conversation where a minor character with a bad nickname tells Bean that he doesn't want anyone using that name anymore.
As much as I loved them once, I won't recommend this book or the series ever again. Just as much of the language and plot in Ender's Game was inextricable from homophobia, this book and its ableism can't be separated without the whole thing coming down. The main antagonist to Bean is Achilles, named because of some unspecified deformity in one of his legs. He is driven to destroy anyone who has seen him in a position of weakness. And... yeah that's his motivation. He begins life disabled in an environment where weakness will get you killed, manages to survive, but hates anyone who looks down on him for any reason, including but not limited to thinking of him as subordinate or unable to do something. But even that "disabled villain" trope isn't the main ableism here. We find out about halfway through the book that a certain character only exists because someone was inspired by the existence autistic people, described in the text as "idiot savants", to experiment on embryos to try and unlock savant levels of intelligence (or greater, if possible). When describing the inspiration for the experiment the book repeats a string of harmful (and untrue) stereotypes about autistic people and uses slurs I will not repeat here. While the person describing this experiment is cast as a kind of villain, his theories are understood to be correct and he's only reviled for carrying them out. This is a story about adults exploiting children, built on several kinds of ableism, and as much as I loved this book before I understood how harmful it was, I don't recommend it. If you missed this bit of the sci-fi canon you don't need to go back for it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism and Child death
Moderate: Animal cruelty and Homophobia
CW for ableism, ableist slurs, assault, murder, eugenics, animal cruelty, homophobia, genocide.
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