Book Review: Ender's Shadow

This year, I'm keeping track of what I read. Whether I enjoy the book or not, I'll post a blurb and brief review. Most will be speculative fiction in some form—genres I gravitate toward in my own writing. Today, it's the YA sci-fi spinoff Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card.

Bean's past was a battle just to survive. He first appeared on the streets of Rotterdam, a tiny child with a mind leagues beyond anyone else's. He knew he could not survive through strength; he used his tactical genius to gain acceptance into a children's gang, and then to help make that gang a template for success for all the others. He civilized them, and lived to grow older. Bean's desperate struggle to live, and his success, brought him to the attention of the Battle School's recruiters, those people scouring the planet for leaders, tacticians, and generals to save Earth from the threat of alien invasion. Bean was sent into orbit, to the Battle School. And there he met Ender...

When this book came out in 1999, I was reading my way through the Ender Quartet for the first time, and I really wasn't all that interested in plodding through a rehashing of Ender's Game from the POV of one of its most annoying characters. But I stumbled across Ender's Shadow last month while taking my students to our school library, and I figured enough time had passed. I was willing to give Bean a chance. And I'm glad I did. Sure, there's plenty of rehashing, but that's only a quarter of the book. The rest is Bean's riveting story, and I've got to give Card credit for making him an extremely likeable character. One star deducted for a few slog-sections, but overall an enjoyable and deeply moving read (with twenty years' distance from Ender's Quartet.) 4 out of 5 stars.