"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card

I... I think I might have to give this 5 stars. Sometimes a "modern classic" gets called that for a reason.

I just opened with the star rating, and that should probably tell you something about how mixed up my brain is right now. Book hangover will do a number on you, man.

Yes, this is a book about improbably smart and competent kids. However, the book acknowledges that these kids are improbably smart and competent, and that the entire point of everything the adults are doing is to make them even more improbably smart and competent. So they can go fight aliens.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for swearing and graphic violence. It's a YA book (I think? It's in the YA section at the library, at least) and thus is afforded more leniency than middle-grade things. This would probably make a good videogame.

 

We're not done with the review yet. Ordinarily I'd go back and rearrange all this, but I'm not doing that for this review because this better represents how my thoughts went when I first finished this.

 

The |twist at the end| (it's |fairly famous, but I'm still not going to spoil it|) hit me quite hard, and I even |vaguely knew it was there|. I think part of that is because it hit Ender hard as well, and you empathize with him a lot. I did, at least.

This book has spawned a lot of imitators, due to being a "modern classic" (as the literary analysis people say). I've read some of them; they're occasionally good and occasionally lame. I can see why it did spawn them, though; it's a good story arc, and one that I can see people going "i could write my own version of that and it would be so cool!" about.

(Endnote: Despite some people complaining the cover in the picture is "lame" [their words, not mine], it's actually one of the best covers out there for this book.)