I’ve had this book on my to read list for a really long time, and decided that I should give it a go before the movie directed by Gavin Hood and starring Asa Butterfield, Abigail Breslin, and Harrison Ford comes out and trailers start giving away spoilers. I don’t know about you, but it drives me crazy when they tell you the whole movie in those things, or just all the good parts. I prefer to go into my movies and books as blind about what they are about as possible, or else I find myself waiting for that part I remembered in the preview, which inevitably is the last scene and so you know the hero doesn’t die or that someone you think is dead is coming back…and I’ll stop ranting about that now since it has little to do with reviewing this book. *Sheepish grin*
I think the reason I had left Ender’s Game on my to read list for so long (a few years now) was simply because it was sci-fi, which I don’t read as much since they have a tendency to be dark and odd in ways that I haven’t previously been as interested in. I guess this is kind of weird since I’m a fan of horror writing, but I think the part that I like about horror is that there is often something in it that is familiar and relatable and sci-fi sometimes just dives off the deep end of space somewhere. I’ve seen Alien and Event Horizon, and you don’t usually want to go to the deep end of space, no matter how good you think it’s going to be trapped in a claustrophobic tin can floating in the airless dark, there’s nasty stuff out there! (Yeah, I could never be an astronaut.) On top of this, the book is getting a tad older and sometimes the writing can be a wee bit dry when compared to today’s standards, so the idea of what it might be in my head was less appealing then most other options.
I now know, that all of the above is pretty much just horrible untrue bias and completely wrong when it comes to this book. The fact that it was given an award for best novel in 1985 by Nebula and 1986 by Hugo might have been a tip off, but alas, I remained unreasonably wary. The book had a good pace, an interesting plot and although it went through yet another rendition of “can _____ be saved by the brilliant antics of _____” I still found myself eating through pages at an alarming rate. (Mmmm…pages)
Ender Wiggin, the brilliant misfit and main character, was extremely interesting. While reading it I was reminded sometimes of both the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Divergent by Veronica Roth, although the book is really quite different from both. I wonder if some of the inspirations from those books might have come from this one, or maybe it’s because they were also highly successful books about kids fighting that were turned into movies. Hmmm…
Either way, I enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to. Maybe you will to? If you have a hankering for some kids in space, military hijinks, or just finding out what the heck I mean by thinking it was similar to the Hunger Games or Divergent give ‘er a go. And if you have any thoughts about it, I’d love to hear ’em.
Lives In Stone 