The shadow you review for free#
The shadow you review series#

The shadow you review for free#

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. If you’re new to the whole series, I think you’ll get a lot more mileage for your time from just reading the 1977 short story. If you’re a devoted Enderite, read this tie things off. It’s all still written well, but it lacks magic. He’s had a lot more misses these days, and a lot more. In part, it’s because Card seems to have lost quite a bit of the flame that burned so bright in the early days. In part that’s because of length and time – somewhat akin to my feeling about The Song of Ice and Fire, should it ever end, but with better characters. Maybe those books wrap things up even more. There’s a lot of the Enderverse that I haven’t read and don’t expect to. It’s not terrible, but a story that started so strong and had such memorable characters deserved better.

The shadow you review series#

It’s, frankly, an overextended series petering out. It just doesn’t do it in a very interesting way. It wraps up – loosely – the lives of the principal characters of the whole series: Ender, Jane, Valentine, Bean’s children, the Hive Queen, the pequeninos, the descolada virus, etc. It’s readable and relatable, and mildly interesting. In any case, this book continues an exploration of the emotional lives of hyper-intelligent people. Peter never really got much of a look in – more plot mechanism than true character, and the same, to a lesser extent, with sister Valentine. I feel we got to know Ender’s shell and his intent pretty well, but his powers just leave him beyond true comprehension. Is that a failure? I suspect Card might say so – much of the series has been about getting to know Ender, after all – but I don’t think so. Only Ender and his brother Peter (the original, not the copy this book is about) really come across as unknowable geniuses, beyond mortal comprehension. Just because you’re a genius doesn’t mean you can’t be nervous, shy, jealous, angry, etc. I think I could boil this book – and some of its predecessors maybe the entire series – down to: super-intelligent people experiencing regular emotions. So I was interested, if no longer really keen, to read this final chapter. Still, it’s fair to say that I’ve delved moderately far into the Enderverse (as Card calls it), and that the first story was very important to me.

I was confused, in part, by the proliferation of spinoffs, only part written by Card, that I didn’t bother with at all. I was less interested by the Shadow sequels, to the extent that I missed one, Shadows in Flight (the prequel to Last Shadow) entirely. I like Card’s writing so much that I bought into the whole Shadow series, which says something – a writer so good I was willing to read the same story again from a different perspective. Here, Card was doing something genuinely new with the story. I was brought around, though, by the sequels, Speaker for the Dead and (somewhat less so) Xenocide. I bought it anyway, and it was fine – a very good story written by an expert, but, for all its length, not better than the short story. Still, I was dubious when he turned Ender into a novel. Martin in short stories (but better at novels). I think Card is (or can be) a phenomenal writer, matched only by George R.R.

Some years later, I started to discover Card’s other work, and was equally enthralled with Songmaster, A Planet Called Treason, Hot Sleep, and other books. It was a story that really brought home to me the possibilities of SFF and the power of a talented writer. “Ender’s Game” was one of the stories to draw me into SFF when I read it in Analog in the late 70s. Of course, he’s fictional, dead, and only semi-resurrected, but I have my bad days too. Allowing for time dilation, he and I are about the same age. That’s when Nora decides it’s time for her to join the battle.I grew up with Andrew Wiggin. Now, years after his death by Umbra attack, Nora is twelve , and sees her mother almost killed by the monsters too. But despite her immunity, Nora’s father refused to let her go. Jesus is able to guide you through the dark morning and evening cry be sent up for his valley of the shadow of death. The only people who can destroy them are immune children like Nora, who are recruited at the age of seven to leave their families behind and begin training at a retrofitted castle called Noye’s Hill.

In Brannland, terrifying beasts called Umbrae roam freely once the sun sets, so venomous that a single bite will kill a full-grown adult–and lately, with each day that passes, their population seems to double. series comes a swift-moving contemporary fantasy about a young girl tasked with destroying deadly shadow creatures. Published JAmazon | Bookshop | Goodreads About Secret of the Shadow Beastsįor fans of Dragon Pearl and the Lockwood & Co.