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Book Summary and Reviews of Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card

Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card

Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Published:
  • Nov 2010, 672 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A powerful secret. A dangerous path.

Rigg is well trained at keeping secrets. Only his father knows the truth about Rigg's strange talent for seeing the paths of people's pasts. But when his father dies, Rigg is stunned to learn just how many secrets Father had kept from him--secrets about Rigg's own past, his identity, and his destiny. And when Rigg discovers that he has the power not only to see the past, but also to change it, his future suddenly becomes anything but certain.

Rigg’s birthright sets him on a path that leaves him caught between two factions, one that wants him crowned and one that wants him dead. He will be forced to question everything he thinks he knows, choose who to trust, and push the limits of his talent…or forfeit control of his destiny.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. An epic in the best sense, and not simply because the twin stories stretch across centuries. Ages 12–up." - Publishers Weekly

"The implications of the boys' power to manipulate the past unfold cleverly…, feeding into the Machiavellian political intrigue for a pulse-pounding climax….Card's many fans will be thrilled by this return to his literary roots." - Kirkus

"Starred Review. Fast paced and thoroughly engrossing, the 650-plus pages fly by, challenging readers to care about and grasp sophisticated, confusing, and captivating ideas." - Booklist

This information about Pathfinder 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.

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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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