Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2005
416 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
In a peaceful, prosperous African American neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mack Street is a mystery child who has somehow found a home. Discovered abandoned in an overgrown park, raised by a blunt-speaking single woman, Mack comes and goes from family to family – a boy who is at once surrounded by boisterous characters and deeply alone. But while Mack senses that he is different from most, and knows that he has strange powers, he cannot possibly understand how unusual he is until the day he sees, in a thin slice of space, a narrow house. Beyond it is a backyard – and an entryway into an extraordinary world stretching off into an exotic distance of geography, history, and magic.
"Crisp, clean writing creates a vivid sense of place and plugs readers into a story they won't want to see end. " - Publishers Weekly
"The author's always elegant prose and storytelling talent add a dimension of grace and morality to his work, which results in a modern fable that belongs in most libraries." - Library Journal.
"Card has constructed a suspenseful fantasy thriller that, during the race to the last page, has one mulling over myth, morals, salvation, and will." - Booklist.
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Nobody had ever won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel two years in a row until Orson Scott Card received them for Ender's Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, in 1986 and 1987. The third novel in the series, Xenocide, was published in 1991, and the fourth and seemingly final volume, Children of the Mind, was published in August 1996. Now a new novel in the Ender's series, titled Ender's Shadow, was published in August 1999 from TOR -- but it's not a sequel. Instead, it returns to the events of Ender's Game and views them from the point of view of another character, a street urchin named Bean. As with Rashomon or The Alexandria Quartet, Card discovers a new story in the midst of the old, when seeing it through other eyes. A sequel to Ender's Shadow will be published...
... Full Biography
Link to Orson Scott Card's Website
Name Pronunciation
Orson Scott Card: or-sun (named after his grandfather, Card says that Orson is a relatively popular name among Mormons and derives from the Indo-European word for bear)
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