A review by quoththegirl
Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card

2.0

Two and a half stars more for Ender's Game nostalgia than for this book's own merit. I don't really know which author to blame (I'm not familar with Aaron Johnston, and I felt that Card's more recent works were wordy and clunky compared his earlier books), but this book was fairly terrible. There are glimpses of something good, which I think is what makes the story so disappointing overall: it could have been interesting, but didn't remotely live up to its potential. The pacing is truly awful. Everytime things were getting exciting and I was actually feeling invested, the pace would grind to a screeching halt with yet another mind-numbingly boring meeting. Seriously, 45% of this book consists of meetings. I mean, I'm a Star Trek TNG fan, so I have a high tolerance for fictional meetings, but jeez louise. Every plot development is talked to death, and then is talked about some more just for good measure. I laughed out loud towards the end when a main character is left in a dangerous situation just so that we could learn, in excruciating detail, about an audit of a random company (yes, you read that right) that had a) nothing to do with the story and b) concerned new characters introduced at the eleventh hour who served very little plot function. I could maybe forgive some of this if the characters were well developed, but I felt as though most of them were flat and boring. Lem was so insipid that I physically cringed everytime I ran across his scenes. Very disappointing, and I won't bother with the rest of the series.