mayajoelle's reviews
743 reviews

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.

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

I always forget how young Petra and Bean are, until I remember, and then I'm a bit weirded out.

Anyway.

This book is pretty good, and I appreciate the complex political and governmental plot points.

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read 4/12/2019
reread 2/3/2020

I don't like this one quite as much as Ender's Game, mainly because the time Bean spends on the streets is very disturbing and takes up an inordinate amount of the book. It's pretty neat to see familiar scenes from a different POV, though.

"You don't want to give God the credit because you don't think he exists. But if you're going to blame him for all the crap, kid, you got to give him credit for what grows from that fertilized soil."

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read 3/20/2019
reread 1/31/2020

This is my favorite of the Ender sequels. I especially love Peter, Wang-mu, and Novinha.

I don't love the sci-fi/fantasy elements (philotes, instantaneous travel, instantaneous mind-creation, basically everything relating to Jane). They add to the story, but they're confusing, and the explanations of them only confuse me more.

I enjoyed the philosophical and religious discussions, and I appreciate that the author (who is a member of the LDS church) didn't include his religion among the many present (humanism, Catholicism, etc.) - not that I'm opposed to reading about Mormon characters, but that would have made it even more confusing for me.

If one has to say, in an argument, "I am intelligent! I do know things!" then one might as well stop arguing.

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read 2/14/2019
reread 1/10/2020

This book is very strange, but I love reading it.

Josiah's review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1634228559) pretty much sums up what I want to say. (Actually, all of Josiah's reviews are very good. Better than mine. :)

(Note: There are some characters with OCD which

Spoiler

actually turns out to be a genetic disorder created to control them, and there's a cure

. I don't know anyone with OCD and can't say how accurate the portrayal is, especially since

Spoiler

they are mostly cured by the end of the story

.)

“When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

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read 1/30/2019
reread 1/7/2020

This book is very different in tone than Ender's Game, but I enjoyed it almost as much as the first book. My major complaint is that vivisection is a major part of the story, and I was not satisfied with the explanation given, just disturbed by the graphic descriptions.

Card gets the big family dynamics just right, though (I mean, my family isn't as dysfunctional as Novinha's, but a lot of the interactions were familiar). And ENDER in this book! I love him as an adult. My other favorite character was definitely Olhado.

The biggest hurdles to reading this book are a) Portuguese pronunciation and b) really deep philosophical discussions that require intense concentration. Worth it if you can get over both of those.

When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.

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read 10/12/2018
reread 1/5/2020

This was a delightful conclusion to the series and I would absolutely love to read more of Anna James' work in the future. I love the way she threads classic references through her utterly lovely original world.

Content:

Spoiler

References/minor screen time to a same-sex couple.

Read very fast in order to make a reading goal... I should probably reread this.