It baffles me how Orson Scott Card, who is terrible, could have written such a beautiful, elegiac work. The characters are well developed, and Card continues the work he did in Ender’s Game with world-building and lore. The final resolution with the piggies was satisfying yet unsettling.

While I liked this far better than Ender’s Game, I was disappointed to see that the female characters were, once again, shoved to the side. (Ah, yes; there’s the Card with whom I am familiar.)