11/13/17

Recently, I finished reading Ender’s Game, a 324-page science fiction book by Orson Scott Card. I read this book because I needed a book to read and I was recommended this book by Mr. Jockers and some other students in my class. I was glad I did. Orson Scott Card is a best selling author who has created the Ender Series that has sold over 7 million copies. He has also written 61 other books, plays, or short stories. He is teaching literature at many schools and universities. In 2008, he received the Margaret A. Edwards lifetime achievement award for Young Adult literature from the American Library Association. He has also won consecutively the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, which has never been done before him. Ender’s game is a #1 New York Times Bestseller and is also an American Library Association 100 best books for teens selection. He has inspired many comic writers and in November 2013, a movie was created that was based of of this book.

The book Ender’s Game, is told in third person, meaning it is told by a person who is not actually in the book, but almost an outsider. The book starts off on Earth where Ender gets in a fight and kills a bully. The IF, also known as the International Fleet, notices this and takes him to battle school, a space station where they train kids to become soldiers, to beat the buggers, who want to try to invade Earth again to colonize it. Ender then gets assigned to an army, which happens earlier than it usually does. Ender is excluded from the army because the leader is jealous of him. He then gets reassigned to another army, where he gets to use the battle room. The battle room is a room that has no gravity and armies fight each other and freeze the other army until they open the enemy’s gate. Ender then gets his own army, who is made up of young students and bad students. Ender uses his army to beat all the other armies in the game, without ever losing.

I wish that Orson Scott Card put in more detail at the command school, which was glossed over unlike the battle school.  It could have been very interesting, but Orson Scott Card just described how it looked, unlike how the battle school took up about ¾ of the book and in that part of the book, Ender was there for about 5 years. At the command school though, that was about half of the ¼ part of the book. Ender was at command school for about 3 years. That means that Orson Scott Card should have used about half of the book for battle school, about a third for the battle school, and the rest for the beginning and ending.

Another thing I wish Orson Scott Card did was make a better ending. The ending was not very good. It pretty much was him leaving command school, and then just him reuniting with Valentine, and him tying up all the loose ends. But, Orson Scott Card planned to make a sequel, so about half the ending was for setting the scene for the sequel. If he did not make a sequel, the ending would probably be many times better.

Overall, I would give this book a 9/10 because of the great details that Orson Scott Card put into this book. One for example, is that when Ender was on ships that were going faster than light, time inside the ship was moving much faster than the outside world.

-Lucas Farmer