Orson Scott Card
Tor Books
Release date: November 11, 2008
List price: $25.95 (384p)
ISBN: 978-0765304964
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Review - "Ender in Exile"
Reviewer: Cori Vella
Rating:
I have been wanting this book for a very long time, nearly to the point of buying myself a plane ticket to North Carolina and camping out on Orson Scott Card's lawn. Not really. But I was very excited when it moved from the "works in progress" status on his website to "completed".
I screamed like a kid in a candy store when it finally came in the mail, and sat down to read it almost immediately. There were three major problems from nearly the start, the first being that I'd been waiting for so long for another piece of the Ender story that I was afraid it wouldn't measure up. The second being that I vastly prefer Bean to Ender, and I figured there would be very little (if any) appearances by him. Lastly, I purchase issues of Intergalactic Medicine Show even when my pocket is empty, and a great many of the stories included in Ender in Exile made their first appearance there.
So while it didn't live up to the hype I created in my mind, and a hefty portion of it consisted of material I'd already read in IGMS, I still enjoyed it. Not one of Card's best, but not one of his worst, either.
Andrew "Ender" Wiggin became a legend when he killed off an entire race of alien beings in the defense of Earth. Ender in Exile picks up in the years immediately after Battle School, a part of Ender's life that until now has been skipped over. The original Ender's Game has no true sequels; Speaker for the Dead takes place 3,000 years after the fact, and Ender's Shadow is about Bean, the Neville Longbottom to Ender's Harry Potter. Through Bean's Shadow quartet, we learn what happens to the other Battle School graduates, but Ender's immediate future hangs in limbo. We know through the other books that he is sent to rule as a governor of one of the first colonies in space. It is on this colony he makes the discovery that results in his motivation in Speaker for the Dead.
Confusing? If you haven't read the other books, then yes, it can be.
That is another major problem with Ender in Exile. It doesn't stand entirely on the legs of Ender's Game. The book alludes to many things that happened in the Shadow quartet, and if one chooses to leap to Ender in Exile after having only read Ender's Game... Good luck. One of the more interesting subplots is originally set up in Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant, the last two books in Bean's series. Calling Ender in Exile the direct sequel to Ender's Game is misleading, as it requires much more reading than that.
But what an enjoyable journey that reading will be, and well-worth it. While Ender in Exile doesn't live up to the quality we've seen in previous years, it still satisfies the Ender fan's roaring appetite (for about two seconds, anyway). Get reading, kiddos. Start at the beginning, and don't stop until you're through. That's the only way to appreciate this book for what it is: the next piece in a well-written, adventurous saga.
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