Shadows in Flight:

This book was pretty good, despite taking up all its time on stupid things.  The first stupid thing this book does is have a character, 'Sergeant,' propose a plan to murder his dad to his two siblings.  There was no reason to murder the dad, Bean hadn't done anything wrong to them and wasn't planning to in the future.  It just came out of the blue as some sort of sane idea.  When that plan is rejected, Sergeant goes back to being a normal nice boy who cooperates with and admires the people around him.  This is too much.  What kind of person decides to murder someone out of the blue, gets beaten up for it, and then decides to be nice for the rest of his life?  What is the chain of reasoning here that leads to both conclusions, one after the next?

The situation was so absurd that the author lampshades it from Sergeant's own stream of consciousness, saying he didn't understand why he'd done it since it made no sense.  Sorry but if something makes no sense, don't write it in the first place.  Don't make your readers swallow shit, especially when you admit outright it's shit.

The second stupid thing this book does is waste most of the book exploring a Formic ship and revising the reality established in Ender's Game that Ender met the last Hive Queen in the universe and was the savior of the species by reviving it at Lusitania.  There was no need to undermine the series like that, it was seemingly done on a whim.  By happy coincidence, exploring the Formic ship led to the cure to the giantism curse the kids had, but the author could have found some other solution to their curse and left out the space marine boarding of alien hulk adventure entirely.  It feels entirely forced just to create something exciting for the kids to live through.

I do like some of the dialogue and philosophical thoughts the kids engage in sprinkled throughout the novel.  Little aphorisms, one-liners that mean a lot, that are worth more than the actual 'plot.'  Mostly I'm just relieved to be done though.  Another series I can finally say 'done' to after 40 years of sequels.  Now if only Xanth would do the same. >.<.  (Did you know Xanth and Ender's Game were both originally published in 1977?  I guess the two authors were competing to see who could draw their story out longer.)