toggle_fow 's review for:

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

3.0

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Okay... this was excessively weird in so many ways.

The one way it was NOT weird was in breeding kink content. There was basically none of that, and yet this book still somehow managed to nearly max out on allowable weirdness. I honestly don't know what to rate it. It was absolutely not four star or greater material. But it wasn't difficult to read, either? Card's constant introspective brooding, snappy dialogue and all-pervasive unrealistic psychoanalysis was as compulsively readable as ever; the only parts that dragged were the Wang-mu and Qing-jao sections that went on and on about the nature of godhood. And yet... and yet... it was so weird.

Three stars to reflect my utter emotional confusion.

Notable points of weirdness:

• We skip like... thirty years forward in time since Speaker for the Dead and yet... all of Novinha's kids are exactly the same. Forty-year-old Ela and Quara and Olhado and all of them interact exactly how they always did in the previous book when they were teenagers. Grego is even exactly the same, and he was a SMALL CHILD last time we saw him.

This is so, so grating. The characters are constantly saying things like "now, children" in a sarcastic way, but the sarcasm doesn't even play because they are literally the same as when they were children. Ender and Novinha are playing the same role, and apparently NONE of these people have grown even a little in thirty years. Honestly, Miro shows the most development over the course of the book, and it's only been a couple months for him.

• Ender and Novinha's relationship is just *flicks hands as if to shake disgusting slime off them*. In the last book there was just some unspoken community understanding that they would eventually get married. In this book they've been married for decades. I still have NO idea what their relationship was, because they have a fight immediately and are broken up for the rest of the book. How am I supposed to feel bad for Ender when I have only EVER seen Novinha, over the course of two books, be an intolerable witch? How am I supposed to feel pain for their broken relationship when I have never seen them HAVE a relationship? All of this feels very weird and vaguely gross.

• More than half of the conflict in this book is straight up JUST intrafamilial strife. They have so many problems to be solving -- the descolada, the approaching war fleet, the Hive Queen's rockets, the complex interspecies conflicts on Lusitania itself -- and they spend so much time just fighting with each other over nothing. Quara and Grego are just hideous. I would kill both of them in an instant. Quite frankly, it's exhausting and boring. Jane is the only one out here working on the actual problems. That's why we have to spend so much time on the planet of Path -- because no one on Lusitania is actually moving the plot forward.

• The Hive Queen is consistently described REAL grossly. Like, just stop, Mr. Card! Just stop being gross! I know you can do it! Just say no!

• The worst part is honestly... New Peter and New Valentine. Like, what on Earth? Why did we need this? The book isn't already weird enough? I promise you, it was already weird enough. Something about Ender's idealized image of Valentine has always been a little weird, and this is taken to a maximum new creepy level with New Valentine. Why is Ender sixty years old and still so unbalanced; he's been grappling with this split concept of himself for his entire life, and he still hasn't come to grips at all with his identity?

Why did someone think it was an okay idea to unleash Evil Peter and One Dimensional Valentine on the galaxy? Are they going to have an important part to play in the last book, because I DON'T want to have to deal with Evil Peter and Wang-mu overthrowing Starways Congress. I just don't need that in my life. The book was already teetering on the edge of "too weird" and this just pushed it right off the cliff.