About this title: Ender Wiggins was only six when he was sent for special training because of his unique talents, and he may be humanity's only hope in a war against aliens. Winner of the 1986 Hugo and the 1985 Nebula Awards.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Tor Classics
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780812575712ISBN:0812575717
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Light edge and corner wear. Spine edges have wear. Tight binding. No marks. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 480 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very Good. 0812575717 Mass Market Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Tor Classics
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780312868604ISBN:031286860X
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Ex-library. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 379 p. Ender Wiggins Saga (Hardcover). Audience: General/trade. read more
"I chose to read this book because of book club. I have liked other books by this author and hearing others talk about this book and how it was a sci-fi book, I just had to read it. Do I dare admit that I like sci-fi? I really enjoyed the story and being able to see into Bean's head and how his thoughts lead to his actions. I always like to know the "why". I've never read Enders's Game and I'm now tentative knowing that you don't really get to dive into Ender's mind. But then again...how can I not read the other book and see this story told from a different perspective?"
"I think I may have like this better than Ender's Game. Maybe I wouldn't have liked it at all if I had read them back to back or had read it rather than listened to it, but trying to remember the sequences in Ender's Game as I read them from a different perspective was interesting. I enjoyed seeing the story from the one training just in case Ender fails. Bean's impassionate analysis vs Ender's emotional turmoil. The kid you don't quite like at first because he's too self-confident in his intelligence and then you learn to trust him better than you would yourself. That's about how I felt about the book too. Slow at first but then as you weave into Bean's perspective you see everything from his conclusions and I came to like him very much, more even than Ender. I empathized with him more and came to to root for him more than I ever had for Ender. How systematically Bean took his place knowing everyone would follow Ender but not him, understanding people did not like or trust him, processing lengthy paragraphs of deductive reasoning in a split second until he had could accurately access any situation so you as the reader recognize the potential he never gets credit for. His story's a little more heart-wrenching than Ender's. He could have been the hero, even if he did not believe it himself. I liked that Bean. And I liked his story.
My only disappointment with the book is that in Ender's Game this was obviously not Bean's story and the few interactions that did not feel authentic to Bean's character are connector points to Ender's story. Case in point, when Bean says he can't find his way back to the dorm, when Bean freaks out not understanding when Graff takes Ender to Commander school, and most importantly when Ender deducts that Bean is a great strategist on small projects but not good at grasping the whole picture. Card tries to smooth these over with excuses like Ender being fed doubts about Bean so he won't keep him busy, but it doesn't quite hit the mark. Either Ender isn't as brilliant as he's sold to be in not being able to understand Bean's genius or Bean was never intended to be as large of character as Ender's Shadow portrays. I just wish Card would have known Bean's story while he wrote Ender's so he could place better clues about Bean's story in the original story."
"When I read a description of a book summing it up as a retelling of a story from a different perspective, I groan internally and my interest wanes slightly.
Ender's Shadow follows those exact lines. We switch from Ender's perspective to Bean's, the brilliant dwarf child who serves under his command.
What shocked me the most was how much more I preferred Bean's perspective. Ender grew up with a loving family and had a generally conventional outlook for a genius. Bean functions as a direct contradiction, having grown up in squalor with no family, a tiny body, and a brain capable of cutting through almost anything.
Bean spends most of the novel slicing through the world of the Battle school at angles that give him vastly more information and awareness of the world than Ender possessed, and his angry, calculating view gives the story a much richer perspective.
The only issues arise from the few points where it directly intersects Ender's Game. Bean wasn't written with a great deal of depth in the original story, he qualified as a background character, and anytime his conversations with Ender come up, the interactions feel weirdly unnatural. It's almost as if this larger, more multi-faceted Bean doesn't fit back in his original container.
Despite what Card states in the introduction, you should not read this book first. Many bits of necessary exposition from Ender's Game are not reiterated here, and part of the fun derives from getting Bean's bird's-eye view of what Ender's witnessed from within the trenches.
The score I gave this book should almost be the score awarded to the two books collectively, as I read them consecutively. There's a reason Card wanted to movie adaptation to essentially be a combination of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. The two complement each other amazingly well."
"Back to the prime stuff! Perfect blend of suspense, point-of-view and story-telling that made "Ender's Game" such a phenomenon!
NOTE: Again, there is a movie coming out next year that supposedly will try to tell the story in this book ALONG WITH the story in "Ender's Game." Don't exactly know how they'll do this without butchering both, so if you value books over movies, read these two books first and then you can tell your friends, "Well yeah, the movie was okay, but it was NO WHERE NEAR as good as the books!""
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