It was a friend that recommended reading Ender's Game through chopped statements of "...I know it's SciFi, BUT...". I finally caved one afternoon while taking my nieces on an Aunt Kate Date to Barnes and Noble.
After feeling comfortably sure that the two girls (ages 7 and 4) were settled into a couple of books in the kids section and would refrain from wreaking complete havoc on B&N (The Limited Too had not been so lucky just 20 minutes prior), I took of to the Information desk to have someone direct me to the SciFi section. Uncharted territory for my tastes.
Three minutes I was away from the kids section. Three minutes. I walked back with Ender's Game in my hand and went to collect the girls. "Look what I did, Aunt Kate!" That statement spawns both excitement and utter dread in the gut of an adult responsible for a 4-year-old.
Sure enough, she had found herself a sticker book she had no desire to take home because she had already completed all the stickering. Lucky for me, a B&N employee was hovering nearby and played the omnipotent witness to me telling the 4-year-old we now had to put away the book she wanted to buy and buy the one she vandalized (I used a different word) and the subsequent tears that followed. Hers. Not mine.
The tears did it. I had to get her the Dora book she had her heart set on, but that noisy B&N lady wouldn't walk far enough away for us to make our escape. And given my current financial status, I could not afford to get both the Dora book and the forever-tainted sticker book while also picking up Ender's Game. But just like that 4-year-old, my heart was set on my book. It was already in my hand, and all.
So I did what any former Borders employee would do in a B&N... I took the used sticker book and stuck it behind some large-sized Italian cook books in the bargain book section and got the hell out of dodge.
It was an easy read for the most part, and didn't necessarily feel like SciFi (No Battlestar Gallactic nuances). I could not, however, get over the fact of how young the main characters were!. Ender, one of the youngest, is called on to be the great General Patton of intergalactic warfare while his sister and brother (barely older than he) become the great philosophic talking heads of the international political scene.
This PARTICULARLY kills me because I've written a YA Fiction novel and have gotten feedback from agents rejecting the work with the reason "You said the character was 17... she's 11 for the first 30 pages. Not old enough for YA. No thanks." I want to email these people back and say, "Ummmm... Ender Wiggin was 6 years old when he started his journey to saving the galaxy by age 12!"
Instead I said, "Thank you for your time and feedback!"
In the end, I liked it a lot. Orson Scott Card... ehhhhhhhh. I shuffled through the Internet to get an idea of his background, and although I love me an editor turned writer and a little Mormon to boost... well, from an interview with OSC on ways he procrastinates:
...watching the Fox News Channel (the only news outlet where the commentators aren't all toadies to power or mental slaves to a predetermined orthodoxy)...
Huh... because Rupert Murdoch is without agenda.
Yet his personal belief statement had some nice tidbits of inspiration on art such as...
Art always carries messages, intentional or not. Therefore good artists do their best to sustain that which is good through their art, and to call for the correction of that which is destructive of happiness.
Though it didn't take him long to spout the very agenda Rupert would be proud to hear in that very same Personal Belief Statement, particularly regarding "family values", I guess is the appropriate buzz term.
Oh Orson... you had me at Ender, and lost me at Murdoch.
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