Very impressed with how good this was. I count myself in the party that there shouldn't have been anything past Ender's Game (like The Matrix and most any sequels Hollywood makes nowadays), but I have to admit this was great.As a parallel novel to Orson Scott Card's classic Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow follows Bean, the kid Ender treats like the teachers treated him.While hesitant to pick this up, I had heard that the Shadow series is better than the original quartet, but I couldn't get away fro...

...dacă nu ar fi coperta asta care pe mine mă îngrozește, aș spune ca e perfectă.Publicată la treisprezece ani după Jocul lui Ender , Umbra lui Ender urmărește evoluția lui Bean, unul dintre personajele inițial secundare ale aventurii lui Ender. Orfan, mult prea firav pentru vârsta sa și fără să-și cunoască prea mult trecutul, Bean reușește să supraviețuiască în iadul străzilor din Rotterdam datorită inteligenței sale. Abilitățile lui neobișnuite atrag atenția sorei Carlotta care îl recomandă...

“I don't freeze up because it isn't my battle. I'm helping. I'm watching. But I'm free. Because it's Ender's game.”2021: Another fantastic reading of Ender's Shadow! I'm hoping to find time to continue on with Ender's Saga. Not sure if this was my third or fourth read of Ender's Shadow. Couldn't believe I had never reviewed it (or some of the other Ender books I reread this year). So I really enjoyed this book, which is a parallel novel of Ender's Game. And if you're wondering, I would be on Tea...

While Ender's Game taught me that reading is fun, Ender's shadow is my favorite book (and series) in the Ender Universe. Ender may be the hero the universe needed but Bean is the most powerful weapon the universe had. The down and dirty story of an orphan child who had to learn to survive on his own at the age of four and looked on the world in contempt is just the hero I needed to re-introduce myself to Card's work.I read this book back when I worked at Barnes and Noble and would sneak reads be...

Ender's Game:There's this really, really smart kid, see, and he's lonely, and he has to do really hard stuff, and adults are mean.OK. I can get with that.Ender's Shadow:Oh, but I forgot to mention, there's this OTHER kid, who's even smarter, like really, really, REALLY smart, and he's also even lonelier, and he has to do even harder stuff, and the adults are even meaner.Give me a break. Yawn. I think Card is great but this is just ridiculous. I read Shadow of the Hegemon but quit after that.

With all honesty, I don’t know what to say right after I finished this book. The book never failed to impress me as it failed my first impression. Yes—my first impression. The fact that I didn’t read yet the Ender’s Game series made me hesitate in pursuing reading the Ender’s Shadow. Credit to Orson Scott for initializing the reason why should I read the book through his well written foreword. Another thing, I’m not deep into novels which set above the earth—or in other words, the outer space. G...

4.0 to 4.5 stars. Okay, now don't turn away thinking that this book is just a "re-telling" of the story of Ender's Game from the perspective of the character of Bean. Not at all. This is not simply OSC cashing in on the success of the Ender Series. This is a completely different novel and there is little to no overlap in the actual events of Ender's Game. It simply takes place at the same time as those events. The purpose of this story is two fold. First, we get to really know Bean who turns

When I read a description of a book summing it up as a retelling of a story from a different perspective, I groan internally and my interest wanes slightly.Ender's Shadow follows those exact lines. We switch from Ender's perspective to Bean's, the brilliant dwarf child who serves under his command.What shocked me the most was how much more I preferred Bean's perspective. Ender grew up with a loving family and had a generally conventional outlook for a genius. Bean functions as a direct contradic...

This is the simplified version of Ender's Game for the kiddie set that can't handle rich characters with moral ambiguity, moral introspection, and character growth.Card does great work teaching people how to re-imagine stories from different viewpoints and with different motivations in his workshops. It's a shame that he didn't demonstrate it here.Instead, we get Bean (a great character in the original story) as a classic Mary Sue, a wish-fulfillment character with all of Ender's skill but none

This book tried really hard to ruin Ender's Game for me. The premise of the book is that Ender wasn't really the hero of his own book, but that his course was manipulated and prodded onward by an even greater genius, in the form of Bean, a member of Ender's army.Bean had a brutal upbringing on the streets, and somehow ended up in Battle School, where he takes over the computer system and runs everything by the time he's six. He ensures that Ender ends up saving the world -- without his help, En...

This is a hard book for me to review without getting angry, so bear with me. The review may also contain spoilers, so if you have not read this book or "Ender’s Game" you may want to skip over this review and just note I'm giving it a 2/5, and would probably drop that down to a 1.5 given the choice.The original "Ender’s Game" novel is, in a word, extraordinary. Its one of those books almost everyone has read. Its translated in hundreds of languages. Its won many, many awards, and has won Orson S...

Should really be read in tandem w/ Ender's Game, actually. I consider the two as one book.

Absolutely fantastic!This is a “parallel novel” to Ender’s Game (which is one of my favorite books of all time). So what is a “parallel novel?” Just what it sounds like! In Ender’s Game, we meet many of Ender’s fellow students in Battle School. In this book, Ender’s Shadow, we follow the life of another student, Bean, who is one of Ender’s friends in the original book. We are briefly introduced to Bean’s life on Earth before he is called to Battle School, and the book ends in approximately the t...

This edition comes with a forward by Mr. Card in which he expresses the opinion that his "later books" in the Ender series are "better" than the first "Ender's Game" but that the first book is action packed, adventurous, and has a boy as main character, so it appeals to younger readers. Thus the greater sales etc. are due to the number of younger readers. Well, I suppose that is part of it. But, even though Mr. Card is the writer, I must "on the whole" disagree with him. The first book is just.....

I personally found that I enjoyed Ender's Shadow more than Ender's Game. Perhaps because I found Bean, as a character, more relatable in how he analyzes and views people and the world in general. He also felt more real as a character in that he is awkward and clueless and greatly flawed.The pacing for this book is a little less smooth in comparison to Ender's Game. The plot, on the other hand, is a little better as you have a greater insight into the background workings of Ender's success. Graff...

This book made me wish I could forget that I had ever read Ender’s Game.Not because it was necessarily a better book – though it is longer – but because the two books offer different views of the same events from two distinctly different perspectives. Ender Wiggin is brilliant and empathetic, a boy torn apart by his own doubts and fears and driven to greatness by a government that sees him simply as a means to an end. It is only his ability to understand and come to love those around him that ge...

Ender’s Shadow: Better than expected - Ender’s Game from Bean’s perspectiveOriginally posted at Fantasy LiteratureEnder’s Game was a SF book so successful and critically acclaimed that it launched Orson Scott Card’s career for decades to come. In fact, it’s fair to say that the story of Ender Wiggins is one of the most popular SF novels the genre has ever produced, to the point of getting the full-budget Hollywood treatment in 2013 (grossing $125 million on a budget of around $110-115 million) w...

Almost everyone I talked to about Ender's Game, told me I should read Ender's Shadow, it's just as good, if not better. So naturally, I was super pumped to get my hands on Card's retelling of one of my favorite tales. Instead, however, I found that after the first couple chapters, it was getting harder and harder to read the book without wanting to chuck it out the window. Here are the main reasons why this book drove me completely bananas and caused me to finally abandon it 200 pages in:1. The

Since Ender’s Game is my all time fav, so is this. ❤️

I think I may have like this better than Ender's Game. Maybe I wouldn't have liked it at all if I had read them back to back or had read it rather than listened to it, but trying to remember the sequences in Ender's Game as I read them from a different perspective was interesting. I enjoyed seeing the story from the one training just in case Ender fails. Bean's impassionate analysis vs Ender's emotional turmoil. The kid you don't quite like at first because he's too self-confident in his intelli...