A Not So Fitting End...

Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card

Before reading this, I already knew what to expect having already ingested the previous three books in this series – Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide, so I’m not sure what exactly about this book was a disappointment. Card finally gives us a kind of end to Ender’s 3000 year life and many plot points that arguably should have already taken place in Xenocide. Unlike the ending to the Harry Potter series, we are not left feeling a sense of sadness and loss at losing a character we have already followed for a thousand pages. Instead, we get another failed attempt at a philosophical science fiction novel. The dialogue is almost endless, one of my major criticisms of the last two books, but here, the religious and spiritual debates reach a crescendo, for me, it was almost too much and almost forced me to stop reading the book. But alas, having loved Ender’s story, maybe only in the beginning to be honest with you, I had to see how everything played out.

I cannot decide whether Card’s note at the end of the book, where he tries explain what it is he was and is trying to do and where he discusses the work of Oe and Endo (both authors I adore), was a good idea or a bad one. For those having read the previous two volumes and presumably this one since you see the note at the end, you already figured that he had an intense interest both in Asian culture and writing and in creating some kind of moral pedagogy in his work. Unfortunately, his finished project does not stand up as well to other writers who have successfully done it—Endo, Oe, C.S. Lewis to name a few—because the philosophy and religion and other spiritual aspects of the novel are so in-your-face and all-consuming that the plot and the storylines disappear.

Anyways, at least I can say that I’m done with this book series…

Interesting Quotes:

“Life is a suicide mission.”

“Do the dead tips of fingernails feel bad when you pare them away?”

“It’s all fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward, but they’re never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.”