Series: Book 8 in the The Ender Saga series
Rating: ***
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Science Fiction - Adventure, Science Fiction; American, Fiction - Science Fiction, Wiggin; Peter (Fictitious character), Science Fiction - General, Adventure, Life on other planets, Space colonies, General, Bean (Fictitious character : Card), Lang:en
Summary
Starred Review. Card's latest installment in his Shadow
subseries (_Ender's Shadow_, etc.), which parallels the
overarching series that began with
Ender's Game (1985), does a superlative job of
dramatically portraying the maturing process of child into
adult. The imminent death of Bean, a superhuman 20-something
Battle School graduate who suffers from uncontrolled growth
due to a genetic disorder, leaves little time for Peter the
Hegemon, Ender's older brother, to set up a single world
government and for Bean and his wife and former classmate,
Petra, to reclaim all their stolen children. When Card's
focus strays from his characters into pure politics, the
story loses power, but it's recharged as soon as he returns
to the well-drawn interactions among Bean's Battle School
classmates whose decisions will determine Earth's fate. They
were trained to fight a (literally) single-minded alien
enemy, but that war is over. Now, as young adults in command
of human armies pitted against each other in messy conflicts
with no clear solutions, Bean's old cohorts must help create
a peaceful future for Earth after they're gone. Card makes
the important point that there's always more than one side to
every issue. Fans will marvel at how subtly he has prepared
for the clever resolution.
Considering the dynasty of novels launched by _Ender's
Game
(1984), perhaps Card ought to consider renaming his
central protagonist. Though this is putatively the eighth
book in the Ender saga, when considering the books as two
quartets linked across a 1,000-year gap (a by-product of
Ender's light-speed travel to Lusitania), it's the fourth of
the sequence that began with Ender's Shadow
(1999). Here, _Card further develops the premise
that the return of Ender's battle team to Earth was
tantamount to introducing "two Alexanders, a Joan of Arc here
and there, and a couple of Julius Caesars, maybe an Attila,
and . . . a Genghis Khan" into the geopolitical fray. The
tension between characters' personal fulfillment and
collective obligations also comes to the fore, as couple Bean
and Petra desperately search for their eight missing embryos
stolen by the mad eugenicist of
Shadow Puppets (2002), watch Bean's health
deteriorate, and attempt to restore order to the world under
hegemon Peter Wiggin. The emergence of several additional
perspectives makes for a somewhat cumbersome narrative, but
it doesn't much matter. Like Card's idolized Battle School
alumni, novels in this saga (not to mention Card himself)
have acquired an irresistible aura from early associations
with boy-hero Ender Wiggin.
Jennifer Mattson
From Publishers Weekly
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