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Ender's Shadow (Shadow Saga) by: Orson Scott Card

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Rating: - Good on its own, great after "Ender's Game"

Firstly, this story is very entertaining in its own right, but if you haven't read "Ender's Game" then I recommend that you start there. In fact, stop reading reviews of this book now before you read any spoilers. This book was written with the intention of being a stand-along novel, and I think that it's a success in that regard, but it's still better to read the 'right way round' in my opinion. Although the two stories are parallel, this one has some 'plot spoilers' of "Ender's Game". Obviously, you'll know what's going to happen either in the other story whichever way you read them, but it works better this way round as the background to some of the key events is not explained to the same extent in "Ender's Shadow".

The story itself centres around Bean, who is a supporting character in the original story. We follow his struggle to survive on the streets of Rotterdam among the gangs of urchins, and then his recruitment into Battle School. The school is located on a space station and is the central training facility for a branch of the international military forces that protect the Earth. They are trying to find and train the greatest military commander that mankind has ever seen in order to defeat an alien race that has attacked Earth twice already. They are expected to return, so all children are tested in order to find the next space fleet commander to defend the planet in the forthcoming battle.

The majority of the book details the tests and training that Bean goes through. This to me was the best part of "Ender's Game", in particular the scenes within the Battle Room, with the teachers contually changing the rules to test Ender. In this story we don't see as much of that side of the action, as Bean is more concerned with the larger picture. He's the youngest and smallest child there, but also smartest. In many ways he appears to eclipse Ender in this version of the story, and that might seem a bit strange to people who have read the original book.

I can't say much more without giving away the twists and turns in the story, but I thoroughly recommend the book to any fans of the Ender series.

Rating: - Brilliant novel

I loved "Ender's Game" when I read it as a girl - and then reading "Ender's Shadow" 15 years later, I am amazed at how brilliant it supplements Ender's Game.

It's the same story, but with a very different angle. We follow Bean and learn of his childhood as an urchin in Amsterdam and how he is recruited to Battle School and fight alone, side by side with Ender - against the buggers, Battle School and himself.

Card succeeds in giving a thorough and interesting insight of the "backstage" life of Battle School and the mechanics - and not least of Bean pulling strings and trying to survive and save the world in his own way.

Rating: - An excellent complimentary book to Enders Game

The reviews here are decidedly mixed - apparently a book you will either love or hate. Personally, I'm one of the ones who loved it.

It is more or less the story of Ender's Game from Bean's point of view. In terms of a novel unusual approach, and an engrossing read - even though you know the story - I couldn't put the book down.

It's hard not to go on, without giving anything away, so I'll stop there! Very highly recommended from me anyway!

Rating: - Awful

If you read this book in isolation from Enders Game (as in having never read it and never intending to read it) then it's probably okay. Not a bad Sci-Fi book with some interesting ideas.

But most people won't read this in isolation. In-fact I doubt that as many as 10% of the people that read this book have not already read Enders Game. And therein lies the problem.

If this book is read after Enders Game then it pretty much ruins that story. Instead of Ender being the lead of the time and the one who can do and see things that no one else can, he becomes a bit of a dullard when put in context with this book. Suddenly his genius is mediocre and the only thing he has is his ability to inspire. Hmmmm.

The worst thing about this book is that clearly OSC decided to go back to the root of his success (his one really excellent book, "Enders Game") and see if he could write more stories surrounding this and some of the other characters. That he wrote the book in such a way as to undermine and ruin the original book is where he has gone wrong. We all realise that speak for the dead was a completely different style of book, and Xenocide / children of the mind were actualy quite poor. What had made Ender an interesting and engaging character in the first book didn't work as an adult.

As the creator of Ender he's obviously entitled to re-write his story. It's just a shame that he did it so badly and ruined the original in doing so.

Very poor OSC. Must try harder.

Rating: - Uncle Orson's Parallel Novel to "Ender's Game"

There are very few examples of "parallel novels," and I must confess that when I think of such things it is Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," which parallel's "Hamlet," that first comes to mind. Anne McCaffrey plays around with it to a limited extent in several of her Pern novels and there is a book out about Ahab's wife, but neither of those is trying to do what Orson Scott Card attempts in "Ender's Shadow." It is rare indeed when the original author decides to go back and cover old ground from a new perspective. But then as most of us well know by now, Uncle Orson does not disappoint his legion of readers.

The title character is Bean, who was introduced in the original novel as even younger and smaller than Ender Wiggin when he first arrived at the Battle School. The Bean of "Ender's Shadow" does not conflict with the character as originally presented in "Ender's Game," but certainly there is little to suggest in the first book of the true extent of Bean's abilities. There was the definite notion that Bean was closest to Ender in terms of being the chosen one, but it was a sketchy idea at best. The strength of this book is how Card expands Bean's character, developing the idea that Bean, the production of an illegal genetics experiment, is the main competition for Ender and perhaps the only viable alternative. It becomes clear early on that Bean is smarter than Ender, maybe smarter than anybody else in the world. However, what is in doubt is whether that awesome intelligence is enough to make him the best choice to lead the Earth's forces against the Buggers. Again, as in the entire Ender series, the question of "humanness" comes into play because of the genetic experiment that resulted in Bean's birth. As always, Card wants to explore this issue in terms of actions and behaviors rather than physical forms and structures.

In his forward Card tells us that he wanted to write "Ender's Shadow" so that it would not matter to the reader which of the two parallel works they read first. In the abstract he has certainly succeeded in this regard, but of course they should be read in the "proper" order simply because it is this newer novel that better informs us of what happened in the first rather than the other way around. When Card actually does cover a scene from "Ender's Game" one of the things I really appreciated was how he could give added significance to dialogue from the first novel (the best example of this is Bean's "The gate is down" during the battle at the Bugger's Homeworld). For those who always liked "Ender's Game" as the first and best of the Ender novels, this one is certain to be their next favorite work in the series.

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