Will M.'s Reviews > Xenocide

** spoiler alert ** The war for the survival of the planet Lusitania will be fought in the heart of a child named gloriously bright.

Says the cover. Such a misleading thing to say. This novel was 500 pages of bullshit, and 91 pages of slight enjoyment. More or less 81.8% of useless shit.

Nominated for the Hugo award? Thank heavens it didn't win.

I loved Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, but Xenocide was just bullshit. It even felt like Card didn't write this. How could he create amazing characters, and manage to make them lifeless all of a sudden? I didn't feel any kind of connection with any of the characters in this third novel. To make things worse, this novel is way too long. 591 pages, rambling on about uninteresting stuff.

The main goal of this novel I believe was to keep things interesting by introducing another possibility of a "xenocide", but all it did was introduce another set of alien species that are not even likeable. They were flat and unrelatable. I'm chinese, and I couldn't even relate to the characters. They were written that bad. I even had to check the front cover to see if Card wrote this alone. Unbelievable how much I hated this novel.

The list of annoying things does not end. Card made the characters seem like they were trying to be like Ender a lot. Miro, Grego, and Wang-mu were all pretentious in this novel. They were trying too hard to be likeable, but they seemed like losers. Especially Wang-mu, and the twist that Card wrote in the near end about her was not even good. She was not a likeable character from the start, so relentlessly trying to make her likeable is not going to work. You might ask, who could be more annoying than Wang-mu? Qing-jao. Another pretentious little bitch. All her whining from the start annoyed me already. I got it the first time, you don't want the life that you were given, so stop whining about it every fucking time you appear in a chapter.

Ender himself was fucking unbearable in this novel. I saw this coming already, but Card just made it worse.

"Ela, after you've inadvertently killed a couple of people with your bear hands, either you learn to control your temper or you lose your humanity."

You killed people with your bear hands? You fucking killed an entire species, shouldn't that be the cause of your "losing of humanity"? Terrible example given, and I thought you were supposed to be the amazing speaker of the dead/murderer of the buggers. And up to now, I still can't believe that he married Novinha. She was fucking crazy right from the start.

The plot itself ventured off a cliff. Instead of focusing on the main story, it focused on the art of whining instead. We get more of scrubbing grease off hands, Miro's paralysis, Ender's marriage, and Novinha's family problem rather than the fucking possibility of a Xenocide. Let me add the constant whining of everyone regarding Jane's "humanity". I don't give a rat's ass who created her, please talk about the fucking Xenocide instead. Based on the summary at the back, this should've been the best of the 3. Instead, I'm considering giving up on the whole series because of this being such a bullshit novel. Once I've calmed down though, I believe I'll be reading the next novel.

1.5/5 stars. I gave this 2 stars because I still have an ounce of mercy left in my system. Card could've done better, and he already proved that with the first two novels. I'm not sure what happened here, but I'm hoping the next novel wouldn't be this bad.

This novel should be called "The Art of Whining" and not "Xenocide".