Ender's Game

I haven't been very good about reviewing the books I read like I did over the summer. I'm not going to start now.

In my Lit for Young Adults class, we had to read a book of our choosing and prepare an annotated bibliography entry for it. The purpose of the assignment was to get us familiar with the annotated bibliography as we have to prepare one for a paper we will be writing. She gave us requirements to follow, and follow I did, but bear in mind this isn't what a true annotated bib would look like. It would contain explanations of several sources related to a topic.

That said, I chose to read something new, Ender's Game, instead of copping out and using something I had already read. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, despite my general disinterest in sci-fi. Here's a cut and paste of my assignment:



Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. New York: Starscape, 1991.

Ender's Game provides a different insight to the lives of child soldiers, maintaining the negative connotation the term "child solider" evokes. The narrative is the first of a series by Card that follows the life of Andrew (Ender) Wiggin from age six when he begins his training as a soldier. In an unidentified future time, Ender is believed by military personnel to be Earth's only hope to defeat the "buggers" that are terrifying the world. Originally written as a story in 1977, Orson Scott Card's foresight created a setting which includes technology that is uncanny in its similarity to today's technology, therefore providing a credible backdrop to the story.

This novel is incredibly well written, containing a theme that has appealed and will continue to appeal to young adults for a very long time. From the beginning of the book, the reader senses that Ender is special. A connection with the reader is formed as a result of Card's skill at depicting Ender as the underdog- an underdog the reader is immediately rooting for and will continue to root for.

Originally, Ender's Game was written for adults. There is no doubt that the material is compound enough to appeal to the adult reader. Ultimately, the decision to market the book to young adults was the right one. Young adult readers will not only escape into Ender's Game, but will likely find some answers in Ender and will never suspect that they are feeding their brains while doing it.