Customer Reviews
Brilliant novel - By: B. Larsen, 19 Jan 2007 
I loved "Ender's Game" when I read it as a girl - & then reading "Ender's Shadow" 15 years later, I am amazed at how brilliant it supplements Ender's Game.
It's the same story, but with a very different angle. We follow Bean & learn of his childhood as an urchin in Amsterdam & how he is recruited to Battle School & fight alone, side by side with Ender - against the buggers, Battle School & himself.
Card succeeds in giving a thorough & interesting insight of the "backstage" life of Battle School & the mechanics - & not least of Bean pulling strings & trying to survive & save the world in his own way.
An excellent complimentary book to Enders Game - By: Mosschops, 05 Jan 2007 The reviews here are decidedly mixed - apparently a book you will either love or hate. Personallly, I'm one of the ones who loved it.
It is more or less the story of Ender's Game from Bean's point of view. In terms of a novel unusual approach, & an engrossing read - even though you know the story - I couldn't put the book down.
It's hard not to go on, without giving anything away, so I'll stop there! Very highly recommended from me anyway!
Awful - By: Voltaire, 17 Oct 2006 
If you read this book in isolation from Enders Game (as in having never read it & never intending to read it) then it's probably okay. Not a bad Sci-Fi book with some interesting ideas.
But most people won't read this in isolation. In-fact I doubt that as many as 10% of the people that read this book have not already read Enders Game. And therein lies the problem.
If this book is read after Enders Game then it pretty much ruins that story. Instead of Ender being the lead of the time & the one who can do & see things that no one else can, he becomes a bit of a dullard when put in context with this book. Suddenly his genius is mediocre & the only thing he has is his ability to inspire. Hmmmm.
The worst thing about this book is that clearly OSC decided to go back to the root of his success (his one reallly excellent book, "Enders Game") & see if he could write more stories surrounding this & some of the other characters. That he wrote the book in such a way as to undermine & ruin the original book is where he has gone wrong. We alll realise that speak for the dead was a completely different style of book, & Xenocide / children of the mind were actualy quite poor. What had made Ender an interesting & engaging character in the first book didn't work as an adult.
As the creator of Ender he's obviously entitled to re-write his story. It's just a shame that he did it so badly & ruined the original in doing so.
Very poor OSC. Must try harder.
Uncle Orson's Parallel Novel to "Ender's Game" - By: Lawrance M. Bernabo, 11 Aug 2004 There are very few examples of "paralllel novels," & I must confess that when I think of such things it is Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead," which paralllel's "Hamlet," that first comes to mind. Anne McCaffrey plays around with it to a limited extent in several of her Pern novels & there is a book out about Ahab's wife, but neither of those is trying to do what Orson Scott Card attempts in "Ender's Shadow." It is rare indeed when the original author decides to go back & cover old ground from a new perspective. But then as most of us well know by now, Uncle Orson does not disappoint his legion of readers.
The title character is Bean, who was introduced in the original novel as even younger & smalller than Ender Wiggin when he first arrived at the Battle School. The Bean of "Ender's Shadow" does not conflict with the character as originallly presented in "Ender's Game," but certainly there is little to suggest in the first book of the true extent of Bean's abilities. There was the definite notion that Bean was closest to Ender in terms of being the chosen one, but it was a sketchy idea at best. The strength of this book is how Card expands Bean's character, developing the idea that Bean, the production of an illegal genetics experiment, is the main competition for Ender & perhaps the only viable alternative. It becomes clear early on that Bean is smarter than Ender, maybe smarter than anybody else in the world. However, what is in doubt is whether that awesome intelligence is enough to make him the best choice to lead the Earth's forces against the Buggers. Again, as in the entire Ender series, the question of "humanness" comes into play because of the genetic experiment that resulted in Bean's birth. As always, Card wants to explore this issue in terms of actions & behaviors rather than physical forms & structures.
In his forward Card tells us that he wanted to write "Ender's Shadow" so that it would not matter to the reader which of the two paralllel works they read first. In the abstract he has certainly succeeded in this regard, but of course they should be read in the "proper" order simply because it is this newer novel that better informs us of what happened in the first rather than the other way around. When Card actuallly does cover a scene from "Ender's Game" one of the things I reallly appreciated was how he could give added significance to dialogue from the first novel (the best example of this is Bean's "The gate is down" during the battle at the Bugger's Homeworld). For those who always liked "Ender's Game" as the first & best of the Ender novels, this one is certain to be their next favorite work in the series.
The most honest book I've ever read. - By: Gordon, 25 May 2004 In this outstandingly entertaining novel Orson Scott Card ingeniously illustrates a world that is physicallly our own, but much different. Out of a world of confusion & fear quietly rises a symbol of humanity's potential named Ender. Ender is a fantastic example of the unexpecting hero who only wants what he wanted as a child, love.
