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tomel's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.5
The best thing I can say about Ender's Game is that it is bad in fascinating ways. There are so many intersections of awful in this book that I will probably never stop thinking about it. But it is an extremely bad book about how a group of naked racist/misogynist children (plus one tomboy) are trained by the Eugenically Perfect War Messiah to commit a genocide but it's okay because they're going to adopt the new generation of the people they killed and raise them as their own. Imagine if Paul Atreides was really into laser tag and felt the White Man's Burden and gave himself the occasional n-word pass. I strongly suspect that the book must have been significantly changed since the 1991 edition I read, because there's stuff in here that should be at least as notorious as the scene in the sewer in IT and nobody talks about them.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Toxic relationship, Violence, Xenophobia, Murder, Colonisation, and War
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Cursing, Death, Misogyny, Sexism, Suicidal thoughts, Antisemitism, Religious bigotry, and Cultural appropriation
For some reason nobody talks about how the children in this book are constantly naked.