There’s a lot of criticism out there about Orson Scott Card’s follow-ups to Ender’s Game being increasingly weak. Actually, I can’t really disagree with that – but I do think ‘weak Enderverse’ is still better than a lot of fiction!

Shadow Puppets is the second half of the middle book (!) in the Shadow Trilogy; that is, following on from Ender’s Game and the three books that followed that, a companion series started with Ender’s Shadow, and continued with Shadow of the Hegemon and this – the latter two being pretty much one story.

I didn’t love this book; the characters have developed strangely, and Bean’s obsession with death (his own, that is) is annoying. More so the love story not so much creeping in as hitting you smack in the face. I found OSC’s repeated character obsessions with ‘having babies’ incredibly irritating, for instance.

That said, the politics, although weakened slightly from previous books, are still intriguing. And of course, the smaller battle between Achilles and Bean needs to have a conclusion!