Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card: **5/8

What a massive change of pace from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which I just finished. Originally I had planned to read Fuentes' Christopher Unborn next, but I found the first 50 pages to be unrewardingly tedious and called it quits. So I moved onto Card's book since I've always wanted to read it. And it took about 3 days. Not even long days. It wasn't like I read all day and night and couldn't put the book down. I just read at night a couple of times, and then spent about 3 hours reading it one day while my wife was shopping for a wedding dress.

I think it would be a magnificent book for a teenager, and I assuredly would have liked it more back then. Not that it didn't hold my interest at this age, but the protagonist and characters are young, and the pervading theme of kids vs. adults along with the school setting and outcast fighting back against the bullies would have been energizing as a kid. As an adult, the bizarreness of kids talking and acting like adults casts a shroud of unbelievability over the whole thing that hinders the story. In the end, I just kind of found myself ignoring Ender's (the protagonist) age. But Card makes this difficult because he keeps mentioning the kid's birthdays. I liked this a little better than Niven's Ringworld mostly because there is more humanity in this story than in the Niven, but Niven's is more intellectually stimulating by a large margin. Also, this book asks a couple of basic and interesting questions, but thankfully doesn't really provide many answers. Instead the ideas it presents, especially in regards to the idea of pushing kids too hard at a young age, are left for the reader to judge. Fun, quick read. But not for me the classic it's reputed to be.
(spring 2002)

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