Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card

STARSCAPE Books, 1977, 324 pp., $5.99
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-4229-4

 

Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, like all the other kids he knows, has been monitored all his life by the government. Which is looking for the next Mazer Rackham, a great general that defeated humanity’s alien enemy almost 70 years ago. Now that the time has again come to wage war, humanity’s only hope is the children of the battle school. Ender’s monitor chip has just been removed and he thinks that he will be able to live a normal life and let others wage war, but he passes a final test and is taken away from his family up to the battle school where a general hopes to turn him into the only weapon that can defeat humanity’s lurking enemy. 

I loved this book; it was cool to watch Ender along with all his friends evolve over the many years that the book takes place. Orson Scott Card does a great job of building emotion into his very interesting and life-like characters, so that, by the end of the book, you feel like you know them very well. Card also does a great job of building philosophy into his writing; he explains in detail Ender’s vast knowledge and Ender’s views and beliefs about his friends, other’s hatred, and his mission, and describes in detail how Ender deals with these things. I a think smart reader could learn a lot from this book. Overall it will not be a book that you want to put down.

This book has two main themes; one of them is friendship and the development of strong friends. At the beginning of the book Ender has no friends but at the end everybody treats him like a friend and trusts him. The other is the will to continue, Ender has to endure brutal training during his stay at the battle school that almost wipes him out completely, but he finds a way to carry on.

I would recommend this book to anyone 12 and up (because of violence and complex content that most people under 12 would not understand); to people that like books with a lot of action, adventure, and tactics; and to people who like books that make you think.

P.S. Ender’s Game is a great book, but Card does not do a good job of maintaining the same amount of interestingness in the book’s sequels, which I would not recommend.

~ reviewed by Shaw