First off, to say that this fourth installment & finale of Ender's journey should have been a climax instead of a denouement? Do people reading your reviews actually pay any attention to your words and what they actually mean, or do they only see what I see on the surface of your quasi attempts at dabbling with intelligent writing? I suspect the later. The be the end cannot also be the climax. Your point is moot.

A few additional examples of what I am referring to is your unintelligible use of a dichotomy:

"...the final installment, on its own, is as unsatisfying as it is pleasing."

and your ill stated refference to the psychological condition of schizophrenia in your pun on the phrase "split mind":

"...I am of split mind about the finale (and how appropriate, given the schizophrenic existence of its lead characters Ender-Peter and Val-Jane)."

Your ignorance in this condition and attempted use of it to be witty only proves my point. "Ender-Peter" & "Val-Jane" have nothing at all to do with schizophrenia. If anything, it would be referred to in the clinical sense as you have used it, as Dissociative Identity Disorder.

In reading your entire review of this particular book, your rather cavalier use of superficial wit is pathetic. If you are going to give a passive-aggressive analysis (i.e. saying that this book should not have been written versus "don't miss it") you should at least not over extend your ego as much as you have here. I can certainly respect your opinion of anything you may wish to have an opinion on; it is the facade that you put on while writing that irks me to no foreseeable end.

All in all, to turn this around into a REAL review, I can agree that this book was considerably more difficult to read than the other installments in Ender's series. As is the case with all of the other books of Ender's universe, including The Shadow Series, I found it to be challenging and enjoyable at the same time. This book certainly dabbles much more into philosophy and certainly does take a more sophisticated train of thought to grasp some of the concepts of the "dizzying dialogue" as D. Cloyce Smith so stated. Perhaps then his/her superficiality is further illustrated by the fact that this book was "unsatisfying" by said person. This installment is certainly no less worthy to be enjoyed and read as any other in the series. If you wish to be challenged intellectually, then you will certainly enjoy this book as deeply as I did.

In Children of the Mind, Orson Scott Card wraps up the Ender's Gamer series. That's what this book is basically for. Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead can stand on their own but Xenocide (the third book) and Children are for those who enjoyed the first two books and want to see the story to the end. Not to be too harsh on the very readable book but little is new. The ending is satisfying but no more. I would recommend the book to those who love Card and want the complete Ender's Game story.

About halfway through "Children of the Mind" I realized that I hated it. With a passion. Anything that evokes so much passion can't be worthless. That's why I'm giving it 3 stars. If you loved the first three books as much as I did, you may similarly feel a strong emotion when you read this one. It's not exactly boring. I just felt like I was in another universe trying to understand what in the world Card was doing.

Why do I hate it so much? Because the characters are all varying degrees of unsympathetic, and all of the major action surrounds Card's weird new mysticism, rather than the intense ethical dilemmas of the previous books. This book is like the opposite of the other books and I couldn't understand why. No one is rational, no one is wise, no one has any empathy at all. The spirit of Ender Wiggin doesn't exist in this book.

No, Ender isn't really present in this book. Card would like you to believe that he is, in the form of Peter and Valentine, Ender's "children of the mind", but I found those characters frustrating and unbelievable and not at all like any side of Ender. Interestingly, they could be viable characters on their own, but Card insists on treating them as if they are not real people and we should not care what happens to them (especially Young Valentine who is subjected to extreme emotional torture but we're not supposed to care about her feelings, she's just an "empty vessel").

No strong characters rise up to replace the absence of Ender. Card tries, with Miro (who becomes loathsome in my opinion)and Peter (all the fun sociopathy drained out of him). With the exception of Wang-Mu, all of the female characters come off looking really bad. You'll wonder why Ender married Novinha, as awful, self-centered and destructive as she is. You'll wonder why you didn't realize (Old) Valentine was such a self-righteous prig before. You'll wonder when Jane became so extraordinarily selfish and annoying.

Far too much time is spent on the planet Pacifica, a planet apparently inhabited by self-righteous and rude religious nuts. The chief one being a holy man who doesn't "believe in ceremony" yet insists any roof he eats under be burned because he is oh so holy. And did I tell you that we are supposed to love these Pacifican nuts? That they are supposedly so wise and above everyone else that main characters are reduced to tears and supplication?

If you want to know how the situation with the Lusitanian fleet is resolved and what happens to Ender and the gang, then go ahead and read this book. I thought everything that happened was backwards and wrong but hey, that's just me.

...and the thread of the story seems to just run further away from the original concepts. Wasn't thrilled with the new ideas expressed in it and wouldn't recommend it as a good read.

Before reading this, I already knew what to expect having already ingested the previous three books in this series - Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide, so I'm not sure what exactly about this book was a disappointment. Card finally gives us a kind of end to Ender's 3000 year life and many plot points that arguably should have already taken place in Xenocide. Unlike the ending to the Harry Potter series, we are not left feeling a sense of sadness and loss at losing a character we have already followed for a thousand pages. Instead, we get another failed attempt at a philosophical science fiction novel. The dialogue is almost endless, one of my major criticisms of the last two books, but here, the religious and spiritual debates reach a crescendo, for me, it was almost too much and almost forced me to stop reading the book. But alas, having loved Ender's story, maybe only in the beginning to be honest with you, I had to see how everything played out.

I cannot decide whether Card's note at the end of the book, where he tries explain what it is he was and is trying to do and where he discusses the work of Oe and Endo (both authors I adore), was a good idea or a bad one. For those having read the previous two volumes and presumably this one since you see the note at the end, you already figured that he had an intense interest both in Asian culture and writing and in creating some kind of moral pedagogy in his work. Unfortunately, his finished project does not stand up as well to other writers who have successfully done it--Endo, Oe, C.S. Lewis to name a few--because the philosophy and religion and other spiritual aspects of the novel are so in-your-face and all-consuming that the plot and the storylines disappear.

Anyways, at least I can say that I'm done with this book series...

Interesting Quotes:

"Life is a suicide mission."

"Do the dead tips of fingernails feel bad when you pare them away?"

"It's all fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward, but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach."