Review: Shadows in Flight

Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having completed the Ender series and following by reading this to complete the Ender’s Shadow series, I was initially led to believe the stories were connecting. Ends up that was originally in the cards for this one, but the author changed the story. In the audiobook of this short novel, author Card himself appears at the end to explain why this, in fact, isn’t the advertised final book in the series. I have grown to enjoy his audiobook discussions of his books, and this few minutes was no exception, giving a peak behind the scenes of building and maintaining a reader-cherished story world.

This one wasn’t up to the quality of the earlier Ender books. Another name might be “Geniuses and Babysitter in Space”. In Card’s other Enderverse books you spent a lot of time in the heads of the characters so as you learned how they thought and could predict their actions, but here it just didn’t seem like that was the focus. The ending was abrupt and conveniently tied up many loose ends – too many. It was like one of those pulp westerns written a century ago where when the author hit his word count, the cowboy up and rides off into the sunset. I do hope there is another in the series that finishes re-connecting the best of the Ender and Bean storylines.


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