A review by theoblongbox
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

3.0

I give this book the same number rating as Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead, but it was certainly not as good as those books. It just wasn't so much worse that I could give it a rating of 2. I can see why people don't like this book as much as the other 2. There are a lot of flaws. The beginning of this book is really not for the average reader. It's something that only true sci-fi fans will enjoy. There is a lot of talk of philotes and the ansible and, for the most part, I just don't care. I am far more interested in the lives of the characters than I am in the physics of the Ender universe. Throughout the book, there seemed to be a lot of physics and philosophy and I just found a lot of it to be boring. Qing-jao is just not a very compelling character in my opinion. It was very annoying every time the story switched from the people on Lusitania to the people on Path, because I really didn't care about Qing-jao and her world at all. It takes a long time for this book to really get started. I was almost halfway done with it and I still felt like I was waiting for something to actually happen. The book also had its strong points. The overall story was compelling and I am always interested to see what will happen next for Ender. The part of the book with Peter and young Valentine really caught me by surprise. It was an interesting twist. The ending of the book was just sad. Even though this book was a bit disappointing, I am still looking forward to reading the next book in this series.