miguel-se7

This one might be a bit of an unpopular opinion but I can't help but say that I was really disappointed by this book. Maybe at the time of publication I would have found the book to be more revolutionary, but at this moment in time I wasn't all that special.

Warning below section contains spoilers for Ender's Game

As per Goodreads, the plot is as follows:

***Young Ender Wiggin thinks he is playing war games at the Battle School, high in orbit, but he is engaged in something far more desperate. Ender may be the military genius Earth desperately needs in a war against an alien enemy seeking to destroy all human life. The only way to find out is to throw Ender into ever-harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly.***

Which honestly sounds like a really interesting book, however, I believe it was executed really poorly.

In Ender's Game we are presented with a Main Character that excels at everything without so much of a struggle. Reading how Ender is able to beat impossible odds at the battle school time after time gets old pretty quickly.

The whole reveal of the final battle felt somewhat bland and, back on earth, I still have no idea how Ender's siblings were able to take over the world through blogging (But hey, silver linings, perhaps there's hope for us Coil bloggers after all), being a weird way to lay the setup for the next novels.

There is not much of an explanation for character's behavior leaving us with the impression that in the future all kids are a bunch of psychopaths. Once you know who is the good guy and who the bad guys the story develops pretty much as you would expect, without much being done in terms of character development.

Overall the writing felt pretty bad, but is what you would expect for a Sci-Fi novel aimed at teens. A combination of strange descriptions and switches between the first and third person perspectives without much of a way to signal them.

Side note: If you get the edition with the Author's introduction go ahead and skip it, or the whole book for that matter, you are better off without reading it. I ended up giving away the whole series to a charity project where I hope they will be better received.

You can find the rest of my reviews here. Be sure to join our ongoing giveaway on r/CoilCommunity. As usual Coil subscribers get some extra content:

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