Kat (Lost in Neverland)'s Reviews > Ender’s Game

DNF at 52%


Dear Orson Scott Card,


There are over 3,310,480,700 women in this world.



Sincerely, Women.


Dear Fans of This Book Who Are Probably About To Make An Angry Comment On This Review:

Please leave now if you don't want to get all huffy and insulted and make a comment defending the author or whatever other shit that is this book.
Or, if you want, go ahead. If you're going to comment, at least read the whole review and not just a quarter of it. I'm so sick of repeating myself over and over in the comments.
Yes, I bash the author first, but I do make my points on why I hated the book itself, and not just because of him.

Thank you.

Sincerely, Kat.


First of all, before I get into the book, I'd like to say that Orson Scott Card is one of the biggest dicks on this Earth. For those of who don't know, he is openly homophobic and a hyprocrite (www.salon.com/2013/05/07/sci_fi_icon_... )). He is a Chauvinist (known to believe that women are the weaker sex and were only put on this world to make babies). He is a Mormon that, from what I've heard from people who've read his other books, tries to convert you in his own writing in his novels.

Just for this author's personality, this book deserves one star.

But now onto the actual book, which deserves one star in itself.


The Author's Viewpoints Leak In

It starts out well enough. It's interesting and keeps your attention. But immediately, the sexism shows its ugly face;


"All the boys are organized into armies."
"All boys?"
"A few girls. They don't often pass the tests to get in. Too many centuries of evolution are working against them."

Keep in mind that this book is supposed to take place in the future. There are several things wrong with this sentence.

1. In this day and age, thousands of women are in the military and fighting for their country. They have been for decades now, and longer still. So if this is supposed to be in the future, does Card think that women will give up their ability to fight so easily?



2. Centuries of evolution working against them? On what terms? That we have ovaries? That we can have babies so are therefore unfit to fight or have the mental capacity to pass the tests boys can easily pass?




This is the 21st century, genius. Women work. Women are in the army. Get your head out of your ass and look around, for fuck's sakes.


Characters

I feel that Card made all the characters far too young. Ender is six, Valentine is eight, and Peter is ten. Peter has a fetish for torturing squirrels and threatening to kill his siblings.
Um, okay? Is there any explanation for this strange behavior? No, because according to this book, all our kids in the future are fully functioning psychopaths. (Except the girls, of course. They're too 'mild' for behavior like that.)
In the future, the army is apparently full of kids barely older than six, up to age twelve. To be trained for a war that, as far as I could tell from the point I got to, was already won.

Writing

The writing was atrocious. Card switches from third person perspective to first person constantly. The first person switches are for the character's 'thoughts', but the words aren't italicized or anything so you can never tell.
To me, that's a sign of bad writing. If you can't stick with one kind of perspective, than you should go back to those non-existent creative writing classes.

Plot

Towards the middle of the book, the plot started to seriously drag and get outright ridiculous. Valentine and Peter start planning to 'take over the world' by writing fucking debate columns. Not only is the whole 'let's rule the world' concept highly overused, it's poorly planned out. It's randomly thrown into the story like, "Okay, we need more villains and more things happening, so let's make the ten year old girl and twelve year old murderous boy try to take over the world!......with debate columns."




Sure.


Then, switching back to Ender, who is now nine years old and a commander of his own kid army, we have our main character turning into the bullying idiots that bullied him in the beginning of the book. Has he learned nothing? Oh sure, it makes the kids 'better soldiers'. They're not even seven years old, they are not fucking soldiers. The whole story is a fucked up version of a 'kid military' which is run by controlling adults who don't want the war to end so they can remain in power.
It--just--ugh.

It got so tedious and irritating that I decided to give up on it. I'm not going to waste my time with a book written by a sexist, homophobic, dickwad. I'm not even going to see the movie, which is a real shame because I love Asa Butterfield. I feel bad that he was brought into such a stupid book/movie business.