Not Card's best work

it was a decent read, but it seems like card has little regard for continuity in the Ender verse. The characters were a little bit lackluster and lacked the personality that characters from previous entries in the series have.

Worth a read once, but I don't forsee myself revisiting the story.

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A closure to all the ender stories and timelines

Loved every bit of it, wish they had the creator of the virus and their source world.

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love it

Loved it, great authors, great narrators! Will be listening to it again soon, I think

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Disappointing

Being an avid reader of the Ender and Shaddow series, I was pretty dissapointed by how unimaginative this book was in tying everything together. It felt like Card didn't want to write the end of the story, so he figured out how to write about something completely different and pass it off as the book we have been waiting for.

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2 people found this helpful

Terribly disappointing story, great performances

I really don't like writing negative reviews, but it's been a month since I listened to this book and I still get put into a bad mood whenever I think about it. If you're really into the Ender series and just *need* to know what's next, you're probably going to read/listen to this book no matter what. Just be forewarned that if you're hoping to find out the answers to *any* of the big questions that the series has brought up previously, you're going to be disappointed.

To be fair, I did enjoy a significant portion of this book. There were some creative ideas and enjoyable story arcs that would have been great in their own book. As the runtime progressed, however, and I started to wonder how the book could tie up any of the loose ends, I began to realize that the detours the book were taking from the main story actually *were* the main story, and that nothing was going to be wrapped up well.

As a conclusion to the Ender saga, the book is a disaster. It's as if the author wrote this without ever having read the previous books, based his characterizations off of book summaries, and just gave up on trying to give satisfying answers to any of the questions the readers have been asking. The "answers" we get to the Descolada problem (you can barely even call them answers) are not only disappointing, but directly ignore and contradict the facts and themes from previous books. Much of te themes that made the Descolada interesting in previous books, no longer make sense with the non-explanation that is given in this book. As for characters, a number of beloved characters are just discarded, either making extremely brief appearances, or not even being mentioned at all (Valentine? Novinha? Nowhere to be seen). Many of the characters we do see have complete personality transplants, barely resembling the characters we got to know previously (eg. Wang-mu goes from a feisty, strong-headed woman, to a gentle, submissive wife). Everything about traveling "outside" is dumbed down and made almost inconsequential (hard to explain without spoilers), and again contradicts how things were explained in previous books.

There's a lot more to complain about, but I'm going to stop there. I've seen some complaints about the performances—I've heard that a favorite performer is missing from this audiobook—but I didn't notice anything on that front. The performances were probably the best part of this book for me. I thought they were exceptionally well-done, with the exception of some bizarrely terrible overdubbing edits in the first few chapters.

If you've gotten this far and still intend to read this book, I wish you luck. I hope you enjoy it more than I did, because I have a feeling I'll still be sore about it a few months from now. Perhaps if you go into it with lower expectations, and treat it as an interesting story set in the Enderverse rather than a finale, you will enjoy it more than I did.

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4 people found this helpful

We waited years for THIS?

I love, love, love the ender series but this book is pure awful. I'm shocked OSC did this. Simply put a terrible book that had no point what so ever. And I know what you're thinking...."I've read all the other books I HAVE to read this one". No you don't. I have been waiting years for a conclusion to the Ender and shadow series and this book was THE WORST. Honestly one of the worst books I've ever listened to, probably the worst actually. Super boring and awful.

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4 people found this helpful