This book is weird. You have to read all of the Shadow books to understand it, but Ender is still a teen, so... you have to be in a very particular place in the saga to understand it. It solves a mystery Shadow fans will have been wondering about (

Spoiler

Bean and Petra's missing child

). And there's some weird stuff with a teen girl trying to seduce a teen boy, and strange physiological info about aliens that I didn't really care about.

I'm glad I read it, because I like the Enderverse as a whole, but I probably won't come back to it. Definitely don't read right after the first book.

---
read 2/23/2019
reread 2/10/2020