Review: 4 stars
Orson Scott Card can truly be called the father of ‘Modern YA literature’. Let’s not be pedantic about the perils of pulpy paperbacks – that stuff sells. And even though you swear on your stars that you can’t stand that trope, you love reading it. The stuff that screams action on every page, romance every other, and chunks of awkward writing in between. Short sentences. Bare naked words. Clear, unambiguous emotions. No undertones. Monotonous characters with only one major flaw (“Your characters aren’t believable unless they have one major flaw”: Literature 101). Bullies. Some more bullies. Two love interests, you being the ping-pong between the two. Parents with secrets. A highly unrealistic mission. Teams compete. Cheerful friends who later stab your back. There is a system. It has contrived rules. Our protagonist is a self-absorbed rebel. Black and white. Tech monsters. Blood. Dark brooding. Cliché in every sentence.
If Harry Potter was a YA, it would have started with Dudley bullying the boy who lived, Quidditch would just have been a game that taught strategy on how best to defeat Death Eaters and dementors, and Harry would have spent his entire life plotting the death of Voldemort. Instead he kissed Cho Chang under the mistletoe (a girl who neither became his girlfriend nor turned out to be his arch nemesis), he made friends with Luna Lovegood not because the story demanded a quirky side-kick to unravel the plot, Malfoy and Dudley don’t die horrible deaths, the ministry was mighty incompetent, & Abeforth Dumbledore minded goats. We don’t love Harry Potter books because Harry Potter is the most noble-hearted hero ever born, we love him because of Dumstrang and Hogsmeade and Colin Creevey and Gilderoy Lockhart – places and characters that might have been edited out if it were a YA.
A plot-line doesn’t make a story. I liked the plot and premise of ‘Ender’s Game’. Do I give a single fuck about any of its characters? God, no! Do I care about the world depicted in the story? Nope! 6-year old kids planning how best to kill other 6-year old kids, 8-year old kids facing depression, some seriously twisted brains and a page-turner of a plot.
I won’t deny – I liked reading the book. But it isn’t sci-fi, it isn’t even a YA. It is a tween-fiction, with enough brooding to last a lifetime.
Alienman 