A while ago I read a truly nasty essay by Card about why homosexuals were ruining the United States. While I am still able to enjoy his other work, his philosophy came through while I was reading this book and really tainted it for me. Unfortunately, I think I would have enjoyed it much more not knowing that Card is actually a FAN of Fox News. Ick.

Shadow of the Giant is a great book because the author, Orson Scott Card included many details and showed great diversity while keeping a conflict small or big at all times. Not only that, but it kept me thinking ‘what’s going to happen next?’ and had great imagery. I can empathise with the main character, Petra because Bean had to leave her or else he would die, so she got depressed as half her children had to go to and this was very sad as unless to live for about 100 more years she won’t see him again. I rate this book 5 stars as I recomend this for drama/ fiction readers.

I have a BookTube channel where I review books, give reading suggestions, and more! Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/dragonarmybooks

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Reread 10/17/21

This one is god-tier. OSC knows how to conclude a series. The emotions I felt while reading this one do not come often or easy. By the end of this book, my love for the characters have blossomed to new heights. We get a satisfying conclusion and know where each of the major players end up. All of Ender's jeesh, after being used and abused (and in some cases they are the ones doing the using and abusing) by their respective countries, find their rest. The Petra and Bean arc gets wrapped up satisfactorily (for now at least). And the world finds some kind of peace, or is at least on its way there thanks to the Hegemon.

This book really is a conclusion. It's certainly not a standalone story, but it was never meant to be. It's an extension of the three books that came before it and it serves that role beautifully.

Shadow of the Giant is certainly in my Top Three when it comes to the Ender's Saga. I love this book.

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Reread 2018 - 5 Stars

I honestly think that I like the final Shadow entry best in the series. Again, I'm not sure if this is because it is the best book, or that by this time, I have a deep love for the characters.

I will say, I think that Card does a great job at wrapping up plot lines. By the end of Giant, we know where each member of the jeesh is, we find the lost children, we see Peter's success, Bean's resolution, and finally, Petra's peace.

It must be very difficult to write a book that concludes a series well. Orson Scott Card did just that with Shadow of the Giant.

This is the last book in the series, but there are enough loose ends left to continue the story. I loved all of the political intrigue in this book. The battle school grads went from being all good-guys, united against the evil Achilles, to real humans whose flaws led them to make mistakes. Bean's storyline was especially moving, as we see how he has grown fom child to adult. We also find out exactly why Peter was not accepted into battle school. There was a purpose all along and he lived up to it beautifully.

I can definitely see another book about Bean's children, especially the one who remained hidden. Volescu is sent into space, where he is supposedly working on a "cure" for Anton's key. I wondered if he had anything to do with the virus entwined with the life cycle of the piggies on Lusitania. Creating a virus like that seems like the sort of thing he might do for fun. He doesn't actually WANT to find a cure for Anton's key, so I wonder what will happen to Bean.

OSC write a woman without turning her into a baby crazy stereotype challenge: failed

Another great one from Card with everything I've come to love from the Ender/Shadow series. I think my big personal connection with this book was how Card used Petra and Bean's relationship to reveal truths about how it is to love someone who either will or will possibly die young. With Bean, it's his genetics, in my life, I have the tension of my husband's profession being so dangerous. In the beginning of our relationship he said he didn't want to put me through being a Marine wife and I told him he didn't get to decide that for me. I already loved him, so his death would have crushed me whether we were married or dating or just friends, so why deny ourselves the joy in the meantime? Thankfully he came through his first deployment unscathed and might not be deploying again. I think Card's portrayal of inevitable pain being worth it with Petra loving Bean is realistic and deftly done. Got me emotional for sure.

This book was ok, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the earlier books.

they;re talking as if the kid is 23 or something when he's really only 16

So good that I went back to re-read the final two chapters just an hour after I had finished the book!

I mostly read this book to find out what happened at the end of the series. There was a good bit of alternative history politics so not so much a sci-fi book in the classic sense. The story seems to leave an opening that I'm not sure Orson Scott Card needs to take. He's mined this universe well as far as I'm concerned.

I just finished reading this book. This is the second book i read that had me tearing up, Thank you Mr. Card for this story. I don't know if there are plans for a next book but i really hope there is, I want to know what happens to Bean. I first read Ender's Game in middle school it was the best thing I had ever read at the time. About 9 years later i see it in Barnes and Noble and remembered how much i liked the book and i was surprised how much i remembered the story, I bought it read it again and thought " Yeah, the same holds true now" (well for me anyway). So i decided to read Ender's Shadow since i found out it took place during Ender's Game, after reading it I came to like Bean more than Ender because he was just more intesting and he had a cruel destiny. I had to know what happend to Bean first so I read the Shadow Series, no... the Bean Quartet. After finishing this book I'm left thinking, I hope Bean's story/life ends well. Top marks for this book.

Spoilers for everything in the Enderverse.

A while back, I wrote a review of Orson Scott Card's magnum opus Ender's Game in which I focused only marginally on the content of the book itself, spending much more time on the author and his hateful, bigoted views, despite the fact that they virtually never intersect with the content of that particular book. In this review, I'll be addressing more immediate problems with the Shadow series -- not just Shadow of the Giant, but also Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets, the two preceding novels. (N.B. I won't be spending much time with Ender's Shadow, the first book in the Bean series, mostly because it doesn't relate very closely to the books that follow, but also because it's the best book in the Enderverse and almost all of the criticism here doesn't apply to it.) I'll also touch on Card's beliefs as they feature in these later books. The reason I'm doing all this in one review instead of three separate ones is because A) the books are annoyingly connected to the point of being structurally flawed (and to the point that I can't actually differentiate, by memory, between them), and B) I don't feel like writing three reviews to make the same points over and over, which is kind of ironic because that's exactly what Card did (only with books).

First, some history (if we're going to write an abominably long review, we might as well do it right). The first Enderverse book I read was actually Ender's Shadow, followed by Hegemon and Puppets; I didn't read Ender's Game until many years later, and I didn't read Giant until just now, because at the time I was reading these books (dating myself) it either hadn't come out or was brand-new and hard to find at the library. (I also read Speaker for the Dead somewhere in there, and the first half of Xenocide, which I've since finished, but I have no idea when.) I really enjoyed the first three entries to the Bean series. Ender's Shadow seemed, as I still believe it to be, like a stronger introduction to the series than Ender's Game, with a better, more relatable lead, whose weakest moments are the preexisting dialogue from Game, at which point Card clearly hadn't thought the character through. I enjoyed the political storylines from Hegemon and Puppets, although with some reservations that have become clearer in hindsight. Then I left the books alone for probably more than a decade before finally returning to them to "finish the series" with Giant (turns out there's yet a fifth book in the Bean Quartet, and a sixth, somehow, coming; I guess Card isn't done milking the golden goose...). It's possible that I would have written this review even if Giant hadn't pissed me off as much as it did, but it did, and now I'm definitely writing this review. Here is a fucking list of many -- but not all -- of the things that Card does wrong (structurally, morally, narratively, etc.) in the Shadow series. I'll bold the theses, just for you.

1) It's probably a little early to do this, but the entire conceit of the Enderverse is patently stupid. Child prodigies certainly exist (although generally in very limited fields, for reasons that are probably really interesting but which I doubt anyone understands), and incredibly brilliant children obviously do as well, but that doesn't mean that they're more competent at what they do than world-class adults in their fields. Gifted children least of all, because being smart and being good at something are radically different things, but even child prodigies are rarely actually the best at what they do, they just get there a lot faster and generally excel in comparison to competent adults. Mozart wrote symphonies while he was a child, but he clearly improved as he grew up and his best work came relatively late in his life. Évariste Galois, a seminal mathematician who died at the age of 20, completed all of his relevant work in the last few years of his life. But Ender, at the time of the final battle in Ender's Game, is only ten or eleven.

The argument that's made in-universe for why the Earth should use its child soldiers is essentially that children have great creativity and are able to command ships in battle without being crushed by the weight of the consequences of their actions. The implication being that adult generals, who know that the battles are real, would be somehow less able to command their soldiers in battle.

Already, this is internally inconsistent: children do not actually perform better in high-pressure situations than adults, and especially when they're essentially being psychologically tortured, as Ender was; and in a field like military command, where experience and knowledge are crucially important, an adult (or at least an older teenager) is much better-suited to make important strategic decisions than even the most precocious child.

But that's not the worst part. Ender doesn't even win because he thinks it's a game, or because he's a child. He's under an outrageous amount of pressure, which makes less than no sense, because why wouldn't you want your child commander as carefree and relaxed as possible? Isn't that the whole point? But no, he wins because he sees a pattern in the enemy ships that no one but Mazer Rackham (who's alive, and apparently just doesn't want to command) has been able to. This is the crucial feature: Ender's ability to think like the Formics. Which has absolutely nothing to do with his age (since Rackham is the only other person who could, and certainly no one else in Ender's team could).

This problem is only compounded as we move into the Shadow series. The overarching plot of the series (or at least books 2-4, i.e. Hegemon, Puppets, and Giant) are that the Battle School kids, and especially those who worked directly with Ender, are so brilliant and special that they must be put in command of every world government to duke it out for total tyranny. But why? The least believable part of Ender's Game was his brother, also a child, albeit an older one, conning his way into political influence by writing anonymous essays online. There's a reason why most countries do not have children, even very smart ones, as their leaders. But with the precedent having been established by Game, Card just sort of rides it out for book after book after book...

2. There's more to life than intelligence. Unless you're in the Enderverse, which has an almost comic-book-level obsession with comparing the characters' relative power levels, which in this case takes the form of pure intelligence. Never will you see more characters described as geniuses and also as all manners of stupid in the same sentence, over and over. Supposedly Bean is the smartest, and then Ender (see Ender's Shadow). After that? Anyone's game. Peter and Valentine are supposedly as smart as Ender (see Game), but the former is regularly outwitted by Achilles, who, per Bean (see Ender's Shadow), is one of the least smart people at Battle School. But he easily captures Ender's jeesh (God I hate that word), which supposedly consists of the best and brightest Battle School had to offer (see... something), even though it actually didn't (ibid), because in fact it was built specifically so that Ender could work with his friends (read: disciples), who nevertheless seem to have a great deal of trouble dispensing with Virlomi, who's allegedly less smart than all of them, and yet isn't, until she's overcome by her gender at the end of Giant (more on this... later) and leads her army into an obvious trap and then retires to narratively convenient exile on a planet somewhere (and will presumably get a four-book series about her coming circa 2025).

3. So Card has a problem with his godawful depictions of women. From what I can gather from his fiction writing (I gave up on his nightmarish political blog posts a while ago), women, to Card, exist for any or all of the following three reasons: to be wives and mothers, to be meaningless figureheads who end up leading their people to destruction, and to be initially strong and well-developed characters who get infected with let's call it biological-imperative-itis and revert to the wives and mothers thing. As a woman who is not a wife, will probably never be a mother, and is unlikely to become a meaningless figurehead etc., this isn't entirely surprising to me; Petra's sudden burst of maternal instincts (at, what is she, like 17?) felt a lot like Card letting out a breath (filled with misogyny) that he'd been holding in for a really long time. Finally, a woman doing what she's meant to. Isn't this more fulfilling than all that fighting? (Yes, is the message you're supposed to take away from this.)

(Oh, and it's not just Petra, either! In Puppets, we get the following very rape-y passage (about Bean):

His mind might say no, but his body would shout yes much louder.

Yikes.)

(Oh, also, can't figure out where to put this, but from Puppets on Card every now and then drops hints about how abortion is murder and even unimplanted embryos are people with a right to life and so forth... I'm including it here because frankly pro-life views are misogynistic.)

I've barely even mentioned Virlomi, who goes from organizing a grassroots resistance movement that spreads throughout India like a virus (remind me to remind you that Card drastically, like disgustingly overestimates the ease and speed with which social and political phenomena spread, which might explain a lot) to literally believing that she is a goddess and forgetting everything she knows about tactics (not to mention strategy), presumably because Card couldn't think of a more convenient way to end the war he created in Puppets. And yet of course she doesn't die, because she's a very special little Battle Schooler and must be sent off to a colony, and let's just jump right ahead to...

4. Orson Scott Card is a racist. Okay, so this might be common knowledge already, but we finally have textual evidence! (Besides the blog posts, I guess.) We can start with Islamophobia, which is a little bit in Puppets but really pronounced in Giant, and move right on into Card rationalizing (retroactively) why all the colonies in the later Ender books are linguistically and ethnically homogenous: because he's a fucking racist.

The great colonies of the past have succeeded precisely because they were internally unified. People who knew each other, trusted each other, shared the same purposes, embraced the same laws. Each one monochromatic to begin with.

(And yet still 3000 years later.)

And Islamophobic.

"Islam," said Peter, "has never learned how to be a religion. It's a tyranny by its very nature."

(Again, this is just one quote of basically a bookful.)

And incredibly, incredibly

5. homophobic. So remember that character Anton, who invented the "key" that turned Bean into a short-lived hyper-mega-genius? It's pretty heavily implied that he's gay, and at some point in the quartet (probably Puppets?) he announces that he's marrying a woman despite his homosexuality, because he believes that having babies with a woman is the only real meaning a man can have... To which our heroes congratulate him. No, seriously:

"My wife helps me," said Anton. "She's very patient with this old man. And you know what? She's pregnant. In the natural way!"

"Congratulations," Bean said, knowing how hard this was for Anton, whose sexual desires did not tend in the same direction as his reproductive plans.

"My body knows how, even at this old age." He laughed. "Doing what comes unnaturally."

This is the sound of me screaming silently.

Oh but also, this is from Speaker for the Dead but it's literally the most suppressed-homoerotic thing I've ever read and I think it's important that you read it:

MIRO: …Maybe I've figured out where their genitals are. Those bumps on their bellies, where the hair is light and fine.
OUANDA: Vestigial nipples. Even you have them.
MIRO: I saw Leaf-eater and Pots yesterday, about ten meters off, so I didn't see them WELL, but Pots was stroking Leaf-eater's belly, and I think those belly-bumps might have tumesced.
OUANDA: Or they might not.
MIRO: One thing for sure. Leaf-eater's belly was wet-- the sun was reflected off it-- and he was enjoying it.
OUANDA: This is perverted.
MIRO: Why not? They're all bachelors, aren't they? They're adults, but their so-called wives haven't introduced any of them to the joys of fatherhood.

Emphasis, naturally, mine.

6. Orson Scott Card is a fucking fascist. Here is a series of quotes for you.

Bean considers the upside of global tyranny:

But then he had to ask himself: Should they be stopped? A quick, bloody, but effective coup which would bring the world under a single government -- it would mean the end of war among humans, wouldn't it? And in such a climate of peace, wouldn't all nations be better off?

Bean remembers his... friend:

Ender was just... himself. Authority came from him like breath.

(Oh, daddy.)

Bean and Mazer Rackham discuss, not to repeat myself, but the upsides of global tyranny:

"Peter's not a great fan of democracy."

"We're not asking for democracy," said Rackham. "Not at first. Not until the power of nations is broken. You have to tame the horse before you can let it have its head."

"And you say you're just the servant of humanity," said Bean. "Yet you want to put a bridle and saddle on the human race, and let Peter ride."

"Yes," said Rackham. "Because humanity isn't a horse. Humanity is a breeding ground for ambition, for territorial competitors, for nations that do battle, and if the nations break down, then tribes, clans, households. We were bred for war, it's in our genes, and the only way to stop the bloodshed is to give one man the power to subdue all the others."

Emphasis, again, mine.

In fact, it's hard to read what I'm going to call the Hegemonic Trilogy, which is literally all about various people seizing power and ends with Peter seizing all of the power, because he's just the strongest and most benevolent... um... unelected global autocrat?, without coming to the conclusion that this is not in any way supposed to be science fiction, but rather what Card wishes would happen to society (and honestly even if it is science fiction you can tell a lot about an author from the stories they tell, not that we need it in Card's case). This is an argument for why... global dominion under a single powerful charismatic leader (wish we had a shorter word for this)... is, like, maybe a good idea for society, and something we should seriously consider. (Hilariously, and probably specifically in the hopes of dismissing claims re Peter's cult of personality, Card drops a conversation in Giant about how Peter -- who got elected by writing anonymous essays online and then united the world under his... political authority? -- doesn't actually have any charisma. Yeah, okay.)

(Fine, final pedantic note before I go: I don't actually think Peter, as depicted here, is a fascist; he's missing a number of core traits and is probably better described as some kind of global dictator. But the point of this section was to focus on Card's obsession -- fetishization? -- of authority, his disregard for democracy, and his emphasis on bringing the world together under a single powerful leader. One could argue that of course Peter isn't depicted as a fascist here, because the trilogy is largely about him, but that from a more objective external perspective he'd fit the criteria a lot better, but ultimately I'm not sure that's an important conversation. This craving for authority, regardless of what kind of authoritarianism it leads to, is the central problem.)

7. The plot is terrible. We're going to go over the overarching plots of the Bean-and-Peter books (real quick, because I'm rapidly running out of characters in this review).

- Shadow of the Hegemon: Achilles, Bean's old enemy from the streets of Rotterdam (and very briefly Battle School) kidnaps Ender's entire... jeesh... and holds them hostage. But why? They draw up lots of battle plans, which they sabotage, and none of which he ever uses. When the authorities close in on him, he executes a daring escape (like his third or fourth of the series), bringing only Petra, who he says is the best of the group, with him to India. There, Petra, not expecting him to use her plan, draws up a plan which she doesn't bother to sabotage (whoops?). Of course, Achilles doesn't use it, instead using a deliberately bad one and fleeing to China as Petra is rescued by Bean. In other words, the whole book focuses on the kidnappings, which benefited Achilles in literally no way whatsoever. Never once does he use a single plan they draw up, and even when he tries to take Petra with him to China, his plan is allegedly to kill her in the helicopter, which of course makes perfect sense and justifies kidnapping her and dragging her across two continents...

- Shadow Puppets: Achilles somehow convinces Peter to bring him into the Hegemony, where he effortlessly seizes power, evidently just by being nice to the staff. Peter flees and apparently suffers no loss of esteem in the public eye. Meanwhile Bean and Petra learn, from poor Anton, that having babies is really the only reason they're alive, and so they get to it. But Achilles, that scoundrel, steals a bunch of their embryos and runs away with them. Bean confronts and kills him, but has no idea where the embryos are. (Also, the Muslim nations unite and are very scary to Mr. Card.)

- Shadow of the Giant: Turns out they're in a bunch of women's uteruses, and Bean's old friend Graff, who's now in charge of colonization, somehow finds eight out of nine of them, which is a pretty good score. Bean peaces out into space, against Petra's wishes (after all, she is only an irrational woman, let us not forget), with three of their kids, eventually dying in the sequel which I will never read (at which point he's FOURTEEN FOOT NINE). The last child is stolen and eventually makes friends with Ender in his colony in yet another sequel, because of course he does. Petra marries Peter, because why the fuck not, and has like five more kids (that's TEN, if you're counting). The plotlines of "what happens to the last child" and "what happens to Bean," which are, respectively, the central plot of Giant and of this whole series, are not resolved in this book, because Orson Scott Card wants to sell you more books.

Also, he hates women, Muslims, ethnic diversity, and gay people, and he craves to be dominated and controlled by a powerful, strong authority.

I have a few characters left, so let me go ahead and end this by saying that I'm a pro-choice trans lesbian anarchist who detests authoritarianism, hierarchy, racism, the military, the state, people who fetishize intelligence, people who write unironic messianic characters, elitism, bigotry, homophobia, gay conversion camps, Islamophobia, the use of child soldiers, bad science fiction, and Orson Scott Card. Gay marriage is legal and your power fantasies will never come to fruition. Eat shit.

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