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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
AHHHHHHHH!!!!
Half of this was during Ender's Game and all of it was awesome! Basically, it was a prequel. What can I say more?
Half of this was during Ender's Game and all of it was awesome! Basically, it was a prequel. What can I say more?
This will be a guilty pleasure for Ender fans, even though it's little more than an exercise in self-indulgence on the part of Orson Scott Card. I worried it would detract from the original stories (I include Ender's Shadow next to Ender's Game as such) but it didn't...it was more of a pleasant journey that scratched a long-held itch to read more about my favorite protagonist. Just remember to try and forget that the author is a raving madman/asshole.
This was a great book and left me wanting more. It's been a while since I have read Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Children of the Mind, and now I feel motivated to read the Shadow series. I listened to the audio version, and they did a good job. The rift in the relationship between Ender and his parents broke my heart.
No stars for you, homophobic douche.
In 2008, Card made a bunch of idiot statements about gay people. I disliked his stuff before that, going back to ENDER'S GAME many years ago; I was once involved with someone who loved the books, so I made the effort to read them; but reading his work and insulting it only became a mission in 2013. That was the Year of the Deletions, when Goodreads committed a horrendous breach of trust by simply deleting reviews flagged by a group of idiot users as "not community friendly" or some such crap.
Users affected by this weren't given notice of the company's intent to destroy their data. It simply...vanished. At that time, I was a significantly more well-read reviewer than I am now. I left Goodreads out of a sense of outraged solidarity with people who had no backups of the content they created, unpaid and out of love for books, that Goodreads then and now uses as value-added sales material. Not that long after Amazon took over Goodreads, it became obvious that "negative" reviews were in for a flagging and, if that wasn't enough, a trolling.
So many issues got rolled into the outrage and sense of violation that goes with some business entity acting ham-handedly that it became easier and better for my personal mental health (which would snap shortly anyway) to get out of here. I went from the Forbes 25...the 25 most influential reviewers on the site...to a group blog and a lonely little personal blog for new reviews. Naturally enough my supposed sway here diminished and then pretty much vanished as life's vicissitudes finally caught up with me and sent me to the psych ward for a good long stretch.
But before I vanished, I mocked the many 5-stars-or-else thugs who ran (possibly still run, I'm better at ignoring people these days) roughshod over the idea of respectful disagreement with the opinions of others by rating some of their darlings as above. It drove them nuts that I rated books like this one AND had read them, so was immune to accusations of partisanship.
Well, not immune, I was and am a partisan of political, social, economic, and moral Liberalism and liberalism. It shows. I'm happy with that.
I liked the premise of this book when I picked it up. I was bitterly let down by Card's erratic weaving in character development, his protagonist lurching across borders of acceptable and consistent behavior for no apparent reason. It's the "no apparent reason" that gets my dander up.
So rather than review the books at the time I read them, I rated them and waited for the haters to hate. They didn't disappoint me. Three years on, I don't care about the anvil chorus of conform-or-suffer any more. So here it is: I didn't like this book by an author whose politics and personality I don't like.
In 2008, Card made a bunch of idiot statements about gay people. I disliked his stuff before that, going back to ENDER'S GAME many years ago; I was once involved with someone who loved the books, so I made the effort to read them; but reading his work and insulting it only became a mission in 2013. That was the Year of the Deletions, when Goodreads committed a horrendous breach of trust by simply deleting reviews flagged by a group of idiot users as "not community friendly" or some such crap.
Users affected by this weren't given notice of the company's intent to destroy their data. It simply...vanished. At that time, I was a significantly more well-read reviewer than I am now. I left Goodreads out of a sense of outraged solidarity with people who had no backups of the content they created, unpaid and out of love for books, that Goodreads then and now uses as value-added sales material. Not that long after Amazon took over Goodreads, it became obvious that "negative" reviews were in for a flagging and, if that wasn't enough, a trolling.
So many issues got rolled into the outrage and sense of violation that goes with some business entity acting ham-handedly that it became easier and better for my personal mental health (which would snap shortly anyway) to get out of here. I went from the Forbes 25...the 25 most influential reviewers on the site...to a group blog and a lonely little personal blog for new reviews. Naturally enough my supposed sway here diminished and then pretty much vanished as life's vicissitudes finally caught up with me and sent me to the psych ward for a good long stretch.
But before I vanished, I mocked the many 5-stars-or-else thugs who ran (possibly still run, I'm better at ignoring people these days) roughshod over the idea of respectful disagreement with the opinions of others by rating some of their darlings as above. It drove them nuts that I rated books like this one AND had read them, so was immune to accusations of partisanship.
Well, not immune, I was and am a partisan of political, social, economic, and moral Liberalism and liberalism. It shows. I'm happy with that.
I liked the premise of this book when I picked it up. I was bitterly let down by Card's erratic weaving in character development, his protagonist lurching across borders of acceptable and consistent behavior for no apparent reason. It's the "no apparent reason" that gets my dander up.
So rather than review the books at the time I read them, I rated them and waited for the haters to hate. They didn't disappoint me. Three years on, I don't care about the anvil chorus of conform-or-suffer any more. So here it is: I didn't like this book by an author whose politics and personality I don't like.
Not as good as the original Ender's Game nor the subsequent Ender's Shadow series, but this book (which really falls largely between Chapter 14 and 15 in Ender's Game, chronologically speaking) does a good job of cleaning up loose ends and setting the record straight. The afterword explicitly states that any discrepancies between this book and the others should be resolved in favor of this book, being the definitive re-writing of bits and pieces of Card's future history which did not hold together.
Worth a read, but finish the rest of the series first. There are storylines wrapped up in this one which more or less require you to have read the other books already to fully appreciate it.
Worth a read, but finish the rest of the series first. There are storylines wrapped up in this one which more or less require you to have read the other books already to fully appreciate it.
A great fabric between so many other books in the Ender Series -- rarely does a book provide such satisfaction as the missing piece of a puzzle.
Има надежда! Няма как да не се радвам, че отново чета за Ендър, симпатяга е човека.
Както от заглавието се подразбира, че Ендър меко казано не е искан на Земята, защото които и да го привлече на негова страна, битката за надмощие на планетата ще стане неравностойна, затова какво е най-лесно... ми пратете го в космоса, да се прави на велик на друга планета. Малко странно ми се стори, че точно книга за Ендър отговаря на много въпроси, които висяха от поредицата за Сянката. Все пак получих желаните отговори, на които цялата история се опираше. На моменти ти се струва, че Кард се е сетил, че е оставил неясни доста неща, и решил да им отговори, като ги събере в един роман.
Както от заглавието се подразбира, че Ендър меко казано не е искан на Земята, защото които и да го привлече на негова страна, битката за надмощие на планетата ще стане неравностойна, затова какво е най-лесно... ми пратете го в космоса, да се прави на велик на друга планета. Малко странно ми се стори, че точно книга за Ендър отговаря на много въпроси, които висяха от поредицата за Сянката. Все пак получих желаните отговори, на които цялата история се опираше. На моменти ти се струва, че Кард се е сетил, че е оставил неясни доста неща, и решил да им отговори, като ги събере в един роман.
Under normal circumstances, I probably would have only rated this book a three, as plot-wise, it is hardly riveting, though enjoyable enough. Though the Enderverse books are never solely about the action, the focus is usually less trained on the characters themselves and their growth than some overarching plotline, which I felt was reversed here. There is still the usual intrigue, but the real reason I had to rate this book with four stars is simply because the book is about Ender and how he thinks and feels in the aftermath of winning the war and he is apparently a horrible Achilles' heel of mine.Essentially, I'd mainly recommend this book to diehard Ender fans. If you like the Enderverse in general, you'll probably enjoy it, and if you love Ender himself, I'd wager you'll really enjoy it, but otherwise, it's not a brilliant sci-fi novel or even particularly well-written.
Why do I keep doing this to myself? Maybe I hope there's some good book in the series somewhere. This just keeps going. Sorry to anyone who's watching my reviews flow into their timeline, but I'm in full purge mode.
I was terribly disappointed with this book. I thought the Ender Quartet and Ender's Shadow were good (haven't finished the rest of the books about Bean yet), but this book really fell flat. As I evaluate the book, I'll try to avoid spoilers, although anyone who's read Ender's Game shouldn't be too surprised at most of the events in the book.
I've come to realize that Card has a difficult time writing believable women. Perhaps he has a difficult time relating to us. I think he did better in the Ender Quartet, but he did not do as well in this book or his First Formic War trilogy. The few women in the book tended toward tropes, falling either into the camp of "sirens" or "motherly figures." I can think of only one female character who is neither, and that's Virlomi. In fact, I find that this book is quite revealing of his attitudes toward women. At one point, Valentine actually wonders to herself, "Is there something in women that makes us long to be humbled?"
I think Card also has a hard time writing believable children, which is perhaps more baffling to me since he was once a child himself. All of the children he writes are either geniuses or at least above average. That makes sense in Ender's Game, but even in his other books he writes children who are scientists, engineers, and brilliant strategists.
In short, this book is lazy. Its characters lack the complexity of human nature, even as the book attempts to provide profound thoughts on human nature.
I've come to realize that Card has a difficult time writing believable women. Perhaps he has a difficult time relating to us. I think he did better in the Ender Quartet, but he did not do as well in this book or his First Formic War trilogy. The few women in the book tended toward tropes, falling either into the camp of "sirens" or "motherly figures." I can think of only one female character who is neither, and that's Virlomi. In fact, I find that this book is quite revealing of his attitudes toward women. At one point, Valentine actually wonders to herself, "Is there something in women that makes us long to be humbled?"
I think Card also has a hard time writing believable children, which is perhaps more baffling to me since he was once a child himself. All of the children he writes are either geniuses or at least above average. That makes sense in Ender's Game, but even in his other books he writes children who are scientists, engineers, and brilliant strategists.
In short, this book is lazy. Its characters lack the complexity of human nature, even as the book attempts to provide profound thoughts on human nature.