Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card

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

In the book Ender's Game a young boy named Ender Wiggin has been taken from his family at age 6 and is enrolled in battle school, where Ender must learn to lead and be led into any situation. He needs this training because there is an alien life form that the humans call buggers. They have attacked earth twice and know that the humans have moved to the offensive. Although Ender is a ruthless super genius he can’t find it in his heart to destroy the buggers so he sticks to the games. But what will happen when the games become all too real for Ender Wiggin?

This futuristic thriller delivers empty excitement.  You will be puzzled by the future equipment and how every body hates a kid just because he is smart; sometimes death threats were carried out. However I did find this book bearable in the fact that in the book you get to know Ender Wiggin and how he feels about being plucked from his family. The reader finds out a lot about what ender is thinking and how he makes his decisions. The dialogues are lovely.

Although this book was intriguing it was like searching for buried treasure and just when you thought the adventure would end another begins. The pirates in my head pressed on but found no salvation in this novel. I also found it hard to believe a 6 year old boy was being trained to kill. In this book Card used terms like the Warsaw Pact. Many of the kids I talked to did not know what the Warsaw Pact was so it would be very hard for them to understand the story. I later realized that Card was actually relating it to real time because he wrote this shortly after the Second World War.

I recommend this book to sci fi fans between the ages of 11 to 15 because of its vocabulary and there are a lot of chapters where Ender kills a classmate. Overall this book did not appeal to me (but I don’t like sci fi). So all you trekkies and Star Wars fans you’re in for a good read but us regular folks shouldn’t touch this book with a 50 foot pole.

~ reviewed by Nicholas P.