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Book summary and reviews of Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card

Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card

Shadows in Flight

Ender's Shadow Series #5

by Orson Scott Card

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  • Published:
  • Jan 2012
    240 pages
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Book Summary

Ender's Shadow explores the stars in this all-new novel...

At the end of Shadow of the Giant, Bean flees to the stars with three of his children - the three who share the engineered genes that gave him both hyper-intelligence and a short, cruel physical life. The time dilation granted by the speed of their travel gives Earth's scientists generations to seek a cure, to no avail. In time, they are forgotten - a fading ansible signal speaking of events lost to Earth's history. But the Delphikis are about to make a discovery that will let them save themselves, and perhaps all of humanity in days to come.

For there in space before them lies a derelict Formic colony ship. Aboard it, they will find both death and wonders - the life support that is failing on their own ship, room to grow, and labs in which to explore their own genetic anomaly and the mysterious disease that killed the ship's colony.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Bean's endless lectures make him appear a mouthpiece for the author; his children's snarky resentment of being talked down to will similarly ring true for readers." - Publishers Weekly

"Warning: Do not attempt to appreciate this book without at least some familiarity with Card's child-warrior Ender series... If you still prefer Ender to Bean after this, you're really hardcore." - Kirkus Reviews

This information about Shadows in Flight 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.

Reader Reviews

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Tommy

Shadows in Flight
I don't want to write an actual review, I just wanted to give the book a good review because I like it and think it deserves better than a 3/5!

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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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