Ender's Game

I spent the holiday’s in Southern California visiting relatives. Instead of flying, we decided to drive. We took the scenic route, via Death Valley and other less traveled locals, and thus spent many hours (days) in the car.

I pre-loaded my iPod with more than a dozen audiobooks to keep us entertained during the trip. Then I struck a deal with my husband, I would play whatever I wanted and he would have the power to say when we had to stop listening to a book and start something else.

On past road trips, I have attempted to select books that I thought my husband would like even though we have different taste. This time I gave him the veto power and told him he was going to have to learn how listen to YA.

Coincidentally, all three of the books he made us stop listening to were OA (old adult), and his absolute favorite book of the trip was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It was my favorite too and is thus this week’s book recommendation. It’s great if you love YA, or if you love Sci Fi, or even if you’re my husband and only like reading tractor catalogs.

If you want to know more about the actual plot, here is what goodreads has to say about it.

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut--young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.