by
Having read Ender's Game for the first time recently, I was quite looking forward to getting my hands on Speaker for the Dead, despite repeated warnings from friends that it was the weakest of the books in the series.
The first hundred pages of the book proved to be irrelevant. Card could have conveyed the same information, and to greater effect with 20 pages scattered through the rest of the novel. Doing that would also have removed the 20 year discontinuity that occurred. As it stands this discontinuity forces us to deal with a whole new set of characters, just when we have become involved with those that were introduced in the early part of the book.
Card also has a problem in creating full multi-dimensional characters. Every character in this novel is portrayed as having a weakness of one form or another, which is fine, I'm sure we all do have our weaknesses, but Card portrays most of them as being solely weaknesses on legs.
5/10
timnfromoz
© 1997 timnfromoz@hotmail.com
Return to
TimN's Reviews Page
Return to TimN's Home Page