After reading Shadow of the Giant for the second time, I once again checked to see if there was or would ever be a conclusion to the story of Bean, the boy I’d fallen in love with in Ender’s Shadow. It DOES exist, came out two years ago as a matter of fact, but it was really hard to find! There is no mention of Shadows in Flight in the one place I would most expect to see it — the author’s own web page! Only persistent digging on the Internet led me to this book, and to the hint that there might be one more to tie the Shadow series together with the rest of the Ender series.
As for Shadows in Flight… To be perfectly honest, I felt pretty neutral about this story. I still want to read the sequel! (So Mr. Card, please write it and then mention it on your website so I’ll know you did. 🙂 ) But it just didn’t feel like much happened in this book. At several points along the way, I wondered why it couldn’t have been a short story. All that really happens is that Bean and his brilliant six-year-olds find and explore an alien colony ship. We learn some new things about the Hive Queen that I’m not sure matter (although they might end up mattering in a sequel), we get to know each of Bean’s children, and there’s quite a bit of nostalgia — memories of Ender, battle school, Petra, etc. Actually, now that I think about it, parts of this book felt like that flashback episode that happens in almost every long-standing TV show. You know the one I mean — on some pretext all the characters start thinking back to… cut to a scene from a previous episode. 🙂
The ending was anti-climactic, but it did give me some closure, which was what I had been missing when I set out to look for this book in the first place. So mission accomplished. Like I said in the beginning, my feelings on this are neutral.