Curse you, Orson Scott Card. I am filled with bitterness at the way this self-indulgent postscript shreds half of Ender's Game, and yet I also adore Bean and his story and have to admit that this book is at least as compulsively readable, if not more so, than the original. I have foolishly played into your hands yet again.

I have a love-hate relationship with this book. As for the love, as you can see I love it enough that not even the "hate" part could dock it even one star. It's right up there with Ender's Game, and Bean is great. His backstory is an easy hook, experiencing Battle School again from another angle is just as good, and honestly, like Bean, I am more interested in political maneuverings on planet Earth than I am in the philosophical/spiritual question of the Buggers and their xenocide. Reading from Bean's perspective is as easy as breathing.

Now on to the hate. This book makes Ender Wiggin look like a brain dead idiot.

Like, okay, Card had a great idea for Bean after Ender's Game had already been set in stone, and so had to pull an awkward retcon. We all get it. It happens. But it does read kind of like, "So, you want more of the story of a supergenius ten year old kid fighting aliens? Okay, get this... here's an EVEN MORE supergenius SEVEN YEAR OLD kid fighting aliens!"

Most of the book is fine. It's only in the thick of Dragon Army's heyday, when Bean and Ender have to actually interact, that the book suffers really badly. Unfortunately, they are stuck using the same outdated dialogue from Ender's Game, written when Bean was just a smart kid and didn't actually have the brainpower of 10 supercomputers. This means that Ender comes off as having not the first clue who Bean is, when the ENTIRE REST OF BATTLESCHOOL KNOWS. Even more egregiously, it also means that Ender, empath extraordinaire, master of instinctual perception, and the most powerful people person in the known universe, IS PERMANENTLY UNABLE TO FIGURE OUT WHO BEAN IS.

Card tries to get around the dialogue problem by inserting a lot of dialogue tags. Bean says a lot of things "ironically" that were played straight in the original book. Bean constantly is wondering why people aren't picking up on his sarcasm. (Because it wasn't actually there in the dialogue, Bean.) Bean can't have a conversation with Ender without self-recriminating about putting his foot in his mouth over and over. This is just cringey and painful. In the scene where Ender trains Dragon Army for the first time, Ender comes off as the most obtuse, tone-deaf bonehead the world has ever produced.

Some things are actually explained away in a decent fashion, like Ender's misapprehension of Bean while at Command School. At that point, Ender is constantly half-drunk on exhaustion and sorrow anyway, and Mazer Rackham being able to poison his perception of Bean seems pretty plausible given his position of influence and Ender's vulnerable state of mind. Unfortunately, there's no easy excuse like that for their time together at Battle School, and there's no way to dance around that dialogue, though Card tried his best.

Ender has never heard of Bean before meeting him? Fine. But Ender not figuring out Bean's real character and strengths and weaknesses after meeting him? Impossible. Ridiculous. Unbelievable. Understanding people is literally what makes Ender Ender. That's the whole dichotomy set up between Ender and Bean: Ender understands people, sees people, loves people. Bean sees and understands everything BUT people. It's incomprehensible to say that somehow among the Battle School gossip mill, the dossier he was given on all his soldiers, and his own supernatural insight, Ender was right about literally everything EXCEPT Bean.

This matters to me because it is upsetting. It's upsetting because I love Ender, and I resent him being made to look like a numbskull because of an awkwardly-handled retcon. It also sets up a weird Ender vs. Bean competition both in the books and in the minds of the people who read the books that is unnecessary and irritating. HOWEVER. I gave the book five stars. Would I undo the retcon? No. Bean and the Shadow series are worth it. Should the retcon have been handled another way? I don't think there was another way. Those scenes of dialogue are incontrovertible and there wasn't any real way to seamlessly mesh them into the new canon.

I've come to terms with it and, like I said, ninety percent of the book is barely impacted at all. Every time I read Ender's Shadow, I'm so engrossed that I'm suddenly at the end before I've really noticed and I'm like, "That's it?!" I'm glad it was written. It's just a bummer that sometimes people read this and take as an attack on Ender's character what was really just the offscreen misfortune of authorial ideas coming in the wrong order at the wrong time.