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Book Review: Ender's Shadow February 6, 2009
Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card is a "companion" novel to one of Card's other science fiction novels, Ender's Game, in that they follow the same events but are told from different points of view with different protagonists. Ender's Game tells things from the perspective of Ender Wiggins, a fantastically intelligent child and natural leader who is tapped by the International Fleet to receive the crash course training needed to protect humanity from an alien threat. Ender's Shadow, published years later, tells the same story, but focuses on Ender's fellow classmate Bean, a character that was ancillary to the first book.
To say that the diminutive Bean is smart would be a drastic understatement. He has a perfect memory and perfect, at-will recall of anything he's seen or heard. He was talking before he was a year old, and by age six he was reading the works of history's great military leaders and authoring scholarly articles with insights so piercing that they put Earth's greatest adult thinkers to shame. Bean also has a great capacity for what's known as "emotional intelligence" --he can immediately read people, intuit things about their motives, understand how they relate to each other in even the most complex social webs, manipulate them, and accurately predict how they will act and react.
Yet for all his mental prowess, Bean's upward mobility in Battle School is hampered by the fact that he's not only younger than any of his classmates, but he's freakishly small for someone even his age. He also finds himself overshadowed and pulled into the gravity of Ender Wiggens, who while not up to par with Bean in terms of sheer intelligence, is much better at leadership, developing his subordinates, and coming up with creative battle tactics. In a lot of ways, this book is about how Bean grows up and defines himself while existing in the shadow of his gifted contemporaries and in the light of not only one word wide threat, but also the one that's sure to follow it.
I liked both Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow because I'm always attracted to characters who are smarter than they are strong. I like to see characters use their mind, wits, and creativity to get out of problems, and Card has a real knack for writing that --especially in children. It's hard to do, because in the end a character can't be more intelligent, insightful, or clever than the writer who created him. But Card pulls it off, and it's great to see Bean use a combination of intelligence, insight, self-control, and drive to persevere. He's just a great character.
As far as how this book relates to Ender's Game, I'd say they're both worth reading. It doesn't feel like a cash-in, and while it lacks that great twist ending that Ender's Game had (Bean deduces the twist ahead of time and tells the reader about it), it still has enough other things going for it. I really didn't like the other two follow-ups to Ender's Game that Card wrote and I read, but that was because they were very different kinds of books. If you liked Ender's Game I think you'll like Ender's Shadow.
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Tags: Book Review, Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, Orson Scott Card, Science Fiction
Comments
Posted by jjohnsen on February 6, 2009 5:40 PM:
I haven't liked most of the books Card has written lately, but this one took me back to how much I enjoyed Ender's game. Maybe it's because I like the characters at this stage of their lives, or maybe Card is a one trick pony.
Posted by Jason Shen on February 27, 2009 1:13 AM:
I've also enjoyed the Ender series greatly - I'm always in awe of how the protagonists navigate their challenges in ingenious but practical ways. If you liked Bean, you should continue the "Shadow" series that follows Bean as he negotiates global conflict, following the end of the Bugger Wars.
Many students at Stanford list this book and esp Ender's Game as one of their favorites, perhaps because we felt, as Bean and Ender do, that we might have been small growing up, but we had mighty minds and hope we'll be able to make a big difference because of it.