Just as good, if not better, than Ender's Game. It tastefully provided another perspective to the events that transpired at Battle School, and offered insight to a character I found to be more interesting than Ender, at least in the years the work covers. I've never read a parallel novel before, and this set the bar for them at a lofty height in my opinion.

I enjoyed this story so much more then I enjoyed Ender's Game. Maybe because I already knew what atrocities these children were put through, or maybe because I just liked Bean better. What ever it was this story is a great companion to read along side Ender's Game. You start to understand the series of events just a little better.

My heart still aches for all these kids.

I couldn’t put this book down. I’m already a big fan of Ender’s game and was a bit dubious that this would really add anything to the already incredible story. But wow! I was so wrong. Bean’s character is original and engaging. His character arc pulled me right in. His flaws were consistent with his character. And they weren’t all resolved by the end of the book.

I also liked this perspective of Ender. Seeing more of the behind the scenes and narrative development was fun. The story was still consistent (as far as I remember). The lead-on from the story is also interesting and I plan to read more of the Shadow series.

Thank you Orson Scott Card for delivering such an excellent story. Your storytelling is going up my list of favorite things to read.

What a book!!!:) It left me wanting to read more at the end of every chapter. The only thing that was a little difficult was at the beginning of the chapters it was hard to figure out who was talking to who. But I found that to be an amazing feature to this book. It made you want to read more and figure out who it was talking, almost making you have to read more to find out. All in all this was an amazing book, and I loved every second of it.

Apart from a cynical exercise in money-making by stoking the wallets of obsessed fans, I can't think of a reason for why this book exists. The underlying flaw is that it seeks to shed light on a series of questions and situations that are simply uninteresting and unnecessary. Who knew from Ender's Game that there were hidden decks in the Battle School? Who really cares. Finding out that Dragon Army was actually intelligently put together and wasn't just full of a bunch of dopes? Wonderful? I guess? Every single thing feels like an exercise in taking a story that was interesting, fast-paced, had lots of moral complications and then giving you the boring outline to that story that explains the logic behind each piece. It's as if you turned the series over to the most antisocial obsessed fan, only then cut out the inevitable uncomfortable sex scenes between major characters that would likely have arisen.

The result is a book that's not just slow, but it's boring and lazy. It's basically 100 percent telling with little to nothing in the way of showing. There are no new and exciting moments we weren't privy to before, instead we just get them from a modified perspective of someone whose omniscience seems to rival the author himself.

What made Ender interesting was his desire to balance empathy while on a task of murder and genocide. Bean is smart. Sure you can have a smart protagonist, but it would look more like a Sherlock Holmes type that's eccentric and entertaining. Bean sits back and is calculating. Maybe that would work if we didn't know exactly where the story was going to go, but when you know the ending, the plotting feels irrelevant.

It's amazing because I remember being shocked at the awfulness of the sequels to Ender's Game. But those things look like Man Booker-level novels in comparison to this.

“I don't freeze up because it isn't my battle. I'm helping. I'm watching. But I'm free. Because it's Ender's game.”

2021: Another fantastic reading of Ender's Shadow! I'm hoping to find time to continue on with Ender's Saga.

Not sure if this was my third or fourth read of Ender's Shadow. Couldn't believe I had never reviewed it (or some of the other Ender books I reread this year). So I really enjoyed this book, which is a parallel novel of Ender's Game. And if you're wondering, I would be on Team Bean. I prefer the Ender sequels, but Bean's story of Battleschool and the war with the Formics is more compelling than Ender's version (in my opinion). That said, Ender's Shadow, Ender's Game (and the Ender's Game Series) are well worth the read. Even though the protagonists are very young (especially Bean), this novel connects lots of issues with good storytelling.

I was blown away by Ender's Shadow. I was surprised that a re-telling of Ender's Game from Bean's perspective could be so enjoyable. I loved Ender's Game more after reading Ender's Shadow as it added a depth and new level of understanding to circumstances I thought I already fully grasped. I tip my hat to Orson Scott Card for this brilliant display of story telling. Love it!

A brilliant companion novel to Ender’s Game. Although it may lack some of the depth of the original novel (besides the thematic echoes inherent in the text), the narrative is very strong. And this being a work written ~15 years after the original, Card is in greater command of character and theme, which shows in this tale, which follows Bean, one of Ender’s lieutenants from the original book.

But Bean’s coming of age story is a lot harsher than Ender’s. He doesn’t come from a stable home, but grows up on the streets of Rotterdam, homeless and without support, with only his intellect to help him survive. In many ways, Bean’s coming of age story is more compelling and fleshed out than Ender’s, at least from a narrative standpoint, but the intersection of these two characters is one of the more intriguing aspects of the text.

I connected quite a bit with Bean’s growth in this novel. He is presented as a character with superior intellect to everyone - Ender included - but seeing him realize that intellect is not everything was illuminating. And especially seeing his realization that Ender (and some others) were actually better at some things than him were some of my favorite moments of Bean’s tale.

I loved this book, even if I didn’t like Bean at certain times. Card showed a supreme mastery at telling a story that ultimately discussed leadership, with some very genuinely insightful observations. While I would never say this is a better book than Ender’s Game, it is an extremely worthy companion piece that should be read by anyone who loved Ender’s Game.

Imagine the movie Baby Geniuses if it were a novel and took itself too seriously

ENGLISH: I found this novel unnecessary, after having read (and liked a lot) Ender's Game. Making Bean a mutant generated by means of genetic manipulation, and turning him into the core and reason of Ender's achievements, adds nothing to the story in my opinion.

Also, the chapter about Achiles in the space station is irrelevant, and seems to be just a way of making the novel longer. Anyway, like most novels by Card, it is easy to read and holds the reader's attention, although its language is even more coarse than in the first book of the series.

ESPAÑOL: Encontré esta novela innecesaria, después de haber leído (y haberme gustado mucho) "El juego de Ender". En mi opinión, hacer de Bean un mutante generado por manipulación genética, y convertirlo en el centro y causa de los logros de Ender, no aporta nada a la historia.

Además, el capítulo sobre Aquiles en la estación espacial es irrelevante y parece ser sólo una forma de alargar la novela. De todas formas, como casi todas las novelas de Card, es fácil de leer y atrapa la atención del lector, aunque su lenguaje es aun más procaz que el del primer libro de la serie.

I liked this book almost as much as Ender's Game. I certainly liked it a lot more then Speaker for the Dead, etc..

It really gives you a whole new perspective on the original. Now I want to go back and re-read ender's game, as well as read the next shadow book, to find out what happens to bean.

After reading (and really enjoying) ENDER'S GAME, I read the blurbs and a few reviews for the subsequent books in Ender's Quartet, and the direction in which Card was going to take Ender's story didn't strike me as particularly appealing. I therefore decided that the ending of GAME, open as it might be, was good enough for me and I had no interest in reading on.
Conversely, the reviews for ENDER'S SHADOW sparked my interest, and I decided to give the "parallax" series (as Card himself dubbed it) a try.

I was ultimately disappointed.

The main problem with SHADOW, for me, was that Bean was simply not as likable and relatable as Ender. This is something I'm sure Card was well aware of, as Bean himself repeatedly ponders on the fact.
I guess the meta-analysis of both characters that Card carries out through SHADOW should be commended for effectiveness, since my feelings for Bean and Ender roughly mirrored what we were told all other characters felt for them in-universe. Unfortunately, Card's conspicuous handwave of Bean's deficiencies as a character didn't make his version of the story any more enjoyable.
In truth, the only parts of the novel which were really enjoyable were the ones in which we got to see Ender again, albeit with Bean's often less-than-perfect side commentary. I also enjoyed the adults' bantering, which was as entertaining as it had been in GAME.
A good portion of Bean's internal monologue, dissecting people and events, was interesting enough, although evidently misguided, and so was all the backstage intel his snooping around allowed us to have. Unfortunately, Bean's numerous and extremely detailed insights, his leaps of logic, all his guesses about what was really going on inside the School, in the I.F., the war effort, and on Earth directly tie into the most problematic aspects of the novel, which boil down to the following.

1) Bean's (supposed) smarts.

Bean is smart. We know that before the beginning of the novel. We know it because it's written on the book's jacket. We also know it because Bean goes to Battle School and only smart kids go to Battle School. Most of us also know it because we read ENDER'S GAME and we know Bean puts the "smart" in smart-ass.
Since smarts constitute a pretty common currency in Ender's world, in order to make Bean's smarts sufficiently novel for the prepared readers, Card chose to make Bean extra-smart. Even smarter than we might have guessed from GAME. So smart, in fact, that his smarts go beyond the humanly possible. And therefore, Bean is (gasp!) smarter than Ender.
With all the times and all the strength with which we are repeatedly told how incredibly smart Bean is, smarter than everyone in the world ever, you'd think we'd gotten the message. So then, one might wonder how the author expects us to buy most of the novel's development.

Specifically...

i) Bean is better than Ender in every way, because that's the only way Card could think of to make him interesting enough to have his own story. But the I.F. doesn't want Bean: they still want Ender. Which is downright bizarre.
Card realizes it and warps the original story enough to lead us to believe that Ender might still be better than Bean because he's more compassionate, and because Bean was afraid before his first battle (was that ever mentioned in GAME). Also, Graff was in charge of choosing the Commander and as he was enamored of Ender he overlooked Bean for most of the time. Except for in the end, where Bean's side story needed closure and Graff suddenly recognized his genius.
Unfortunately, this doesn't make any sense within the framework of the original novel, where Graff repeatedly states, not only to Ender, but also in the "offscreen" conversations, that Ender is the last and *only* hope for humanity.
To a reader of GAME, Bean's incomparable, inhuman genius totally comes out of left field. Particularly, Ender's fans end up feeling cheated out of most of Ender's feats, as apparently we're supposed now to revise all events knowing that Bean's hand and Bean's mind was behind most of them. This is apparently supposed to make Bean shine through on his own merits, but all it accomplished, at least for me, was to leave a sour taste in my mouth for the implied damnatio memoriae of Ender.

ii) Bean is smarter than everyone anywhere and yet the Officers in charge of the School keep up with him without much effort, and Bean himself, despite much acute thought and lots of apparently genius guesswork, comes to the wrong conclusions about 80% of the time.
This would be fine, if this was, overall, Bean's story and if this was a standalone novel, or the first novel in a standalone series. But it's neither of these things and almost everyone reading SHADOW will have read GAME already. We know what's really going on, and we are perfectly able to see how Bean almost *never* comes to the right conclusion, which ends up being frustrating if we're supposed to be cruising the mind of a super-genius.
The only thing Bean guesses right is the nature of the final "games", and that was merely necessary because we had read through that deception before and it would probably have been considered a little implausible to pull off again. Everything else is either very easy to figure out, and the fact that only Bean guesses it speaks more about the other kids' intelligence than Bean's (ex. Ender being their ultimate Commander); or totally fabricated theories which Card makes Bean develop just to give him something to think about throughout the novel, but which the adults would have been perfectly able to come up with themselves -- and probably were intended to have worked out for themselves in the original work (ex. the inevitability of conflict on Earth after the war in space and the importance of the child-generals for all earthside factions).

2) Bean's origins.

The whole subplot dealing with Bean's origins was, in my opinion, totally unnecessary. It might have been interesting if it had been worked more organically into the story, and if it actually had any consequence to the main plot. As it was, the whole genetic manipulation subplot was tacked on only as a page-filler and in order to simultaneously justify the fact that Bean was apparently a better choice than Ender, but that Graff still preferred Ender for the job.
If Bean had been a just a smart, gifted little boy, lost to his parents when he was very young and somehow dropped in the streets of Rotterdam, who just happened to be comparable to Ender but sufficiently younger as to have missed his opportunity to be chosen as Commander, and was therefore prepped in much the same way as Ender to act as his second-in-command, nothing in the story would have changed significantly, except for the excision of pointless passages on genetic manipulation. Sister Carlotta would still have found Bean's family and Nikolai would have still been his actual brother.
The genetic manipulation adds nothing to this novel and it appears it adds very little to the rest of the series, since it merely seems to be the cause of some personal drama for Bean when he doesn't want to have children and when it forces him to leave for interstellar travel in order for him not to die... with the children he didn't want to have in the first place.

All this considered, ENDER'S SHADOW ends up reading like a mediocre fanfiction for ENDER'S GAME, with a very similar voice, but subpar plotting and characterization, which moreover takes some very gratuitous jabs at the original story.
I'm not saying that Card shouldn't have bothered: a spin-off series about an interesting side character is not necessarily a bad idea. But Card could definitely have done something better with it, steering clear of the original story, maybe only skimming through it from Bean's perspective but without changing it only to make Bean look like a main force in what was, essentially Graff's and Ender's game, and going into more depth with everything regarding Bean's personal story, integrating it all much more prominently in the novel.
Ultimately, where SHADOW fails is the fact that instead of being the story of Bean, the littlest soldier who happened to learn side by side with Ender and take part in the destruction of the Formics, but who had a very interesting story of his own, it is merely still *Ender's* story, only slightly revised and told from a different perspective. And therefore totally unnecessary.