Format: Audiobook

I liked this book a lot. Not as much as Ender's Game but well...I have Ender up on a high hiigh pedestal. I actually didn't enjoy seeing Ender from Bean's pov. Bean's pov of scenes that happened in Ender's Game were my least favorite parts because it was like rewriting my thoughts for those scenes. It also felt a little forced at times.

That aside, it was another amazing book. I loved to see the inner workings of Bean, from Rotterdam to Battle School. Achille, Sister Carlota, Poke...were all great new characters. Bean's best friend in battle school, Nikolai, was the best :) The very last scene in the book made me tear up and that is RARE for me. My favorite part of the book was honestly seeing Bean mess with Graft, Dimak and even Anderson. Haha :) It was great.

I didn't love Bean like I did Ender but I did like him. The book makes me want to read Ender's Shadow book #2 one day just to see Bean interact with Peter Wiggin. Must be very interesting. I also want to read Ender's Game book #2 and it makes me happy that both continuing storylines of the Enderverse seem promising. One day! After reading an Orson Scott Card book I always need to take a mental break before picking the next one.

5/5

I loved it. One of my new top 5 books ever. Might even prefer it over Enders Game (also 5/5 by me).
The conversations are so intellectual and adventurous. The pace is high but great. So nice to read a book where every page and every chapter has such quality. I'm not even a keen SF reader, but this is my jam.

Great new perspective about the actions taking place in Ender's Game ! And the Bean Saga really looks promising! Hope the other volumes are as good!

Me encanta la forma de escribir de Orson Scott Card. Si hubiese sabido lo bueno que era este libro lo habría leído mucho antes. Mi corazón se dividió en dos, ahora amo a Bean y a Ender por igual a pesar de lo extremadamente distintos que son. El final me ha conmovido hasta las lágrimas.
El libro es muy bueno, léanlo, no se arrepentirán.

So glad this book was written. Firstly because I loved the world of Ender and was really interested to see another take on what he was going through. However the character of Bean was actually just as interesting if not more so. His incredible beginnings set the tone for a tale of hardship and hard won battles.

I LOVED this book.

It's about a year since I read Ender's Game and coming back to Battle School through Bean's eyes was so exciting. Beans is an amazing little guy - so real and so flawed. I really enjoyed him as a character. It was also wonderful seeing the familiar story unfold through another POV. Bean brings a new dimension to the battle.

Ender's Shadow has inspired me to reread Ender's Game. I can't wait for Bean's character to appear so i can really compare the two books.

Peronally, I think Orson Scott Card is a genius.

It feels so incredibly good and rejuvenating to come back to this series finally. The entire Ender’s saga is so near and dear to my heart, it is so comforting to know that I can always count on a brilliant time when picking up one of these books. I can’t contain my excitement to plough through more of this series in the new year. More more more hats off to Card.

The original series is about Ender, but this one is about someone like him, as smart as him, his name is Bean. you don't have to read Ender's Game to understand this series, they are parallel.

Ender and Bean are little kids, they will go to command school, a school in the outer space, they will learn everything, including and most importantly how to win a war! in order to be ready for the aliens' attack after the second invasion of humans on the Bugger's home planet.

I loved this book! It was a little confusing at first. The time period, and the whole situation that Bean was in was really weird and I didn’t understand it until a bit later. When I did start to comprehend what was happening, I became more interested in the book and wanted to read more of it. The end was the best part by far. It was very intense and detailed, and kind of sad.
I really want to read more of these novels. I’d love to read all of the other perspectives. It’s really interesting that someone would write multiple books about the same event, but just in some of the other characters point of views.
I would definitely read this book again, because I still don’t completely understand everything. Like the whole Achilles thing. But even though I was confused for some of this, it’s still a really good book and I would definitely recommend it to everyone.

When I read a description of a book summing it up as a retelling of a story from a different perspective, I groan internally and my interest wanes slightly.

Ender's Shadow follows those exact lines. We switch from Ender's perspective to Bean's, the brilliant dwarf child who serves under his command.

What shocked me the most was how much more I preferred Bean's perspective. Ender grew up with a loving family and had a generally conventional outlook for a genius. Bean functions as a direct contradiction, having grown up in squalor with no family, a tiny body, and a brain capable of cutting through almost anything.

Bean spends most of the novel slicing through the world of the Battle school at angles that give him vastly more information and awareness of the world than Ender possessed, and his angry, calculating view gives the story a much richer perspective.

The only issues arise from the few points where it directly intersects Ender's Game. Bean wasn't written with a great deal of depth in the original story, he qualified as a background character, and anytime his conversations with Ender come up, the interactions feel weirdly unnatural. It's almost as if this larger, more multi-faceted Bean doesn't fit back in his original container.

Despite what Card states in the introduction, you should not read this book first. Many bits of necessary exposition from Ender's Game are not reiterated here, and part of the fun derives from getting Bean's bird's-eye view of what Ender's witnessed from within the trenches.

The score I gave this book should almost be the score awarded to the two books collectively, as I read them consecutively. There's a reason Card wanted to movie adaptation to essentially be a combination of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. The two complement each other amazingly well.

5 ⭐️s!!! Hands down “Ender’s Shadow” was equal if not surpassing “Ender’s Game”!!! ORSON SCOTT CARD is the BEST science fiction writer of all time! I can’t believe how good this parallel novel (sequel) to Ender’s game was, depicting Bean’s perspective instead of Ender’s of the same events in the first book! Bean is an amazing hero-friend which helped guide Ender in saving mankind! Both protagonists share similar qualities but have unique differences in strengths that make this book so interesting! Loved every page and can’t wait to share this book with my son who read “Ender’s Game”...

3.5 Enderverse Stars rounded down to 3 Shadow Stars for, like the three preceding Enderverse installments, being over 100 pages longer than is enjoyable.
If you thought Ender’s Game was a good read, well, I did too! And you are sure to find it worth your time and energy to read Ender's Shadow (Enderverse #5). Set on the same time line as Ender's Game, the story is told from an extraordinary battleschool student's POV. A galvanizing parallel narrative but. like its forerunners, blusters on for over a hundred pages more than is enjoyable.
Well, on to Enderverse #6: Shadow of the Hegemon