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A War of Gifts: Book summary and reviews of A War of Gifts by Orson Scott Card

A War of Gifts

An Ender Story

by Orson Scott Card

A War of Gifts by Orson Scott Card X
A War of Gifts by Orson Scott Card
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Book Summary

Orson Scott Card offers a Christmas gift to his millions of fans with this short novel set during Ender's first years at the Battle School where it is forbidden to celebrate religious holidays.

The children come from many nations, many religions; while they are being trained for war, religious conflict between them is not on the curriculum. But Dink Meeker, one of the older students, doesn't see it that way. He thinks that giving gifts isn't exactly a religious observation, and on Sinterklaas Day he tucks a present into another student's shoe.

This small act of rebellion sets off a battle royal between the students and the staff, but some surprising alliances form when Ender comes up against a new student, Zeck Morgan. The War over Santa Claus will force everyone to make a choice.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"[A] perfect stocking stuffer for science fiction fans of all ages." - PW.

"A Little League stocking stuffer that nevertheless makes several cogent points. Ender lives on." - Kirkus Reviews.

This information about A War of Gifts was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Orson Scott Card Author Biography

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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