Wednesday, April 13, 2011


I had never read this book before, but others at my High School had to read it and they said it was a really good book.


"Ender's Game is one of the great ones, a novel of extraordinary power that is among the very best the genre has ever produced. Written at a stage in Orson Scott Card's career when it seemed as if he could genuinely do no wrong, Ender's Game takes a familiar theme from war fiction — war as seen through the eyes of a child, as in Ballard's Empire of the Sun — and reframes it by making the child the war's central figure. It is a tale defined by a sense of both tragic inevitability and cold irony. It is not merely about the loss of innocence, as so many stories are with children at their center. It is about innocence systematically deceived and purposefully destroyed in the fanatical pursuit of a misguided higher ideal."


"It's 2070, forty years since a devastating alien invasion was barely turned back, and the world is desperately searching for soldiers to lead them to victory when the "Buggers" come again. That's why they're drafting young children who pass a rigorous screening, and sending the best of them to the orbiting Battle School, where they are trained from childhood to be ready for war in the vertiginous reaches of space. Into the unending pressure of military training comes six-year-old Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, who struggles to keep his humanity even as the adult teachers, rivals among his fellow students, and the strange unseen influence of the alien invaders all threaten either to destroy him or to make him into someone he can't bear to be. His genius raises him to the top of the intensely competitive games in the Battle Room, an immense null-gravity chamber where armies of youngsters engage in mock combat. But his real struggles are off the playing field - with a dangerous older boy named Bonzo Madrid who is determined that both he and Ender cannot survive in this place; with his teacher, Mazer Rackham, who won the last war on a fluke and now is trying to prepare Ender to win the next one by skill rather than luck; and with himself, as Ender wrestles with his own demons, desperate to remain a decent human being even as he sees himself being transformed into exactly the same kind of monster as the buggers themselves."


It's really really good, and it's one that the men might want to read with you!

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