It's Friday, baby!

It’s Friday again, yay!  That means it’s time for another book review!

This week we have:

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

I never read this book as a kid.  I was much more into series books, like Baby-Sitter’s Club and Sweet Valley, to have any use for sci-fi or fantasy.

But as I got older, I had the desire to read books of more substance.  I wanted to enjoy stories that took longer than a month to go from idea to printing.

And thus, I came across Ender’s Game.

This book is set in the future, and has some dystopian elements, such as child limits and world war, but life, for the most part, seems fairly normal.

The Wiggins have three children, in a two child limit world.  Their first two children were geniuses, and were tracked by the government to see if they would be good candidates for military leadership, but were determined to be insufficient.  The government coerced the Wiggins to have a third child, the titular Ender.

Ender was teased and mocked by not only his classmates(‘third,’ they called him) but by his own brother, who was jealous of Ender’s tracker.  Ender had his tracker for much longer than either of his siblings, and was eventually decided to be sent to battle school, to be trained to fight in the war against the buggers.  He is only six years old at this point.

It is here that Ender’s genius really shines, when he excels at the null gravity game that is the crux of the whole school.  Ender helps take the armies he is assigned to to wins and higher rankings, while helping train the younger and less skilled classmates in maneuvers and things.

Ender eventually has a full army at his command, and it is here that the book really goes into full force, and so I will stop recapping events, in hopes you go and read this book.

This book goes through many themes and ideas, from humanity and compassion, to leadership and villainy, and what it means to understand your enemy.

Ender is a fully formed character, one that, even though he ages significantly through the book, you don’t really notice a change in his tone, but you do notice changes in his compassion, in his understanding of the world.

There are a lot of good thoughts and ideas that come through in this book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone that enjoys a good character driver story.

Rating: 5/5 buggers