Review - Shadow Puppets

I've been trying to read a book each month, if I can. And, since my preferred material is novels, or collections of short stories, I have been able to keep up the pace pretty well. As I was just gone on a trip that had several long days of air travel, I was able to get two books read. I reviewed one of them last week, Ender's Shadow, and I indicated in that review that a review of Shadow Puppets would be coming soon. Here it is.

Unfortunately for me, Shadow Puppets is a sequel, but not the immediate sequel, to Ender's Shadow.

What does this mean?

Well, as a sequel to Ender's Shadow, the primary character of Shadow Puppets is Bean - the fascinating hero of that prior book. It's been several years since Ender's Shadow concluded, so Bean has grown up a bit -- he's a teenager well into puberty by now -- and he's had some character-defining experiences. Unfortunately, those experiences are told in Shadow of the Hegemon, the book between Ender's Shadow and Shadow Puppets.

I've felt like Orson Scott Card's other books in this universe have been much more self-contained. But, of course, I never tried to read them out of order. A large portion of the first half of Shadow Puppets ends up describing what has happened in the SotH book, so that characters and their motivations are better understood. I found these expositions to be slow and cumbersome. Necessary, I suppose, but they were not gripping reading, like Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow were.

And then there were some points where it really sounded like Card was just using characters to preach. One former scientist, in particular, has a view of human needs to pair up in marriage that just screamed "author's beliefs on display" while not advancing the story in a critical way.

Ultimately, I did want to finish the book. I cared enough about Bean and his friends (and unlike Ender's Shadow, this book dealt with his friends quite a lot) to see what happened, but I never felt like there was enough peril to make me worry. Further, the genius little boy from the first books was gone. We rarely got a view of what Bean was thinking, except in his conversations. Considering that the genius of Ender's Shadow lay greatly in the creation of a genius point-of-view character, Card missed the mark by putting the reader outside Bean.

I suppose I'll go back and read the intervening book sometime, despite knowing so much of the action from the recollections in this book. But then again, maybe I won't. If it's no better than this one, and I already know who lives, who dies, and so on, why bother?

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[P.S. Sherry informs me that the next book in the series {Shadow of the Giant} is really, really good. But she agrees I would probably be wasting my time reading Shadow of the Hegemon. Life's too short for mediocre books. I'll skip it.]