Product Description

Bean, Ender Wiggins' former right-hand man, has shed his reputation as the smallest student at Battle School. He has completed his military service for the Hegemon, acting as strategist and general in the terrible wars that followed Ender's defeat of the alien empire that attacked Earth. Now he and his wife, Petra, yearn for a safe place to build a family - something he has never known. Yet no such place exists on Earth, a world riddled with Bean's enemies from the past. Once again he must follow in Ender's footsteps and look to the stars.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95898 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Review
Praise for Orson Scott Card 'A great action-orientated plot' THE TIMES, 'Literate, provocative, moving, thrilling ... a hard act to follow...The work of a confident master with an absolute grip on his material' SFX

About the Author
Orson Scott Card is the award-winning author of ENDER'S GAME, SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD and XENOCIDE. He lives with his wife and three children in the US.

Customer Reviews

Confusing
The front cover of this book describes the "Shadow of the Giant" as "the stunning conclusion to the shadow saga" and thus must be interpreted as the last book in this series. If it is the last Bean book I feel extrememly cheated. The book is written with normal Shadow Saga style, lots of action plus political questioning and young love so no problems there. The ending of the book left me feeling cheated as it ends without resolving Bean's rather large problem. It does not conclude Bean's life and is rather an easy way out of avoid what is undoubtedly a complicated plot line with Bean. All in all rather disappointed. However, if this is not the last we'll see of Bean then it is a very good cliff hanger. I will await another book!

Something new now please Mr. Card!
I bought this latest (and last?) volume in the Ender related Bean saga in the hope that I would enjoy it more than the preceding volume. I did not. Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead were amongst the most enjoyable books I ever did read. The first volume in the Bean Series was very good as well. As the volumes went on though plots became more and more convoluted, global politics too much of a feature and I enjoyed the tales less an less.
I hope Orson Scott Card will return to form soon. It's science fiction rather than political fiction I would like to see and more personal stories.

Uncle Orson's Parallel Novel to "Ender's Game"
There are very few examples of "parallel novels," and I must confess that when I think of such things it is Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," which parallel's "Hamlet," that first comes to mind. Anne McCaffrey plays around with it to a limited extent in several of her Pern novels and there is a book out about Ahab's wife, but neither of those is trying to do what Orson Scott Card attempts in "Ender's Shadow." It is rare indeed when the original author decides to go back and cover old ground from a new perspective. But then as most of us well know by now, Uncle Orson does not disappoint his legion of readers.

The title character is Bean, who was introduced in the original novel as even younger and smaller than Ender Wiggin when he first arrived at the Battle School. The Bean of "Ender's Shadow" does not conflict with the character as originally presented in "Ender's Game," but certainly there is little to suggest in the first book of the true extent of Bean's abilities. There was the definite notion that Bean was closest to Ender in terms of being the chosen one, but it was a sketchy idea at best. The strength of this book is how Card expands Bean's character, developing the idea that Bean, the production of an illegal genetics experiment, is the main competition for Ender and perhaps the only viable alternative. It becomes clear early on that Bean is smarter than Ender, maybe smarter than anybody else in the world. However, what is in doubt is whether that awesome intelligence is enough to make him the best choice to lead the Earth's forces against the Buggers. Again, as in the entire Ender series, the question of "humanness" comes into play because of the genetic experiment that resulted in Bean's birth. As always, Card wants to explore this issue in terms of actions and behaviors rather than physical forms and structures.

In his forward Card tells us that he wanted to write "Ender's Shadow" so that it would not matter to the reader which of the two parallel works they read first. In the abstract he has certainly succeeded in this regard, but of course they should be read in the "proper" order simply because it is this newer novel that better informs us of what happened in the first rather than the other way around. When Card actually does cover a scene from "Ender's Game" one of the things I really appreciated was how he could give added significance to dialogue from the first novel (the best example of this is Bean's "The gate is down" during the battle at the Bugger's Homeworld). For those who always liked "Ender's Game" as the first and best of the Ender novels, this one is certain to be their next favorite work in the series.