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I read this a number of years ago and was disappointed for a number of reasons. First, it won a coveted Hugo and Nebula award but was, in my opinion, seriously flawed.

This is the only book wherein I lost my suspension of disbelief. It happened toward the two-thirds mark in the book (about where the author originally had ended the story) and Ender and his older sister (by a couple of years) were on retreat. Ender was swimming around a floating dock where his sister was sun bathing and discussing the "situation." Somewhere and out of nowhere Ender made a comment having to do with the physical development of their bodies, referring to their age (which, given his comment, would have placed them about 8 or 9 for ender and 10 or 11 for his sister.

The comment was out of place for Ender as he had never, ever said anything like it before, anywhere in the book. He had always maintained a clean mouth, despite the military environment (after all, he was a kid).

The second problem was that I had felt the story had advanced over the period of enough years that Ender was now a teenager and to be reminded that he was still a fourth or fifth grader yanked me out of the story faster than the Chris Reeves character was yanked back to the present in Somewhere in Time.

Finally, the last third of the book was an add-on. In talking with others familiar with the work and its history, Card was asked to make it longer. As such, the last third of the book is poorly connected to the first two-thirds of the book and introduces concepts and character types not encountered or even hinted at earlier. I really have to wonder why this thing won the Hugo or the Nebula. The SF community must have been desperate the year this came out.

I cannot recommend this to many people, mostly because of the suspension of disbelief problem and the add-on disjointed story-line. I really wish Card had gone back and rewritten the entire book. It would have been much better.