Review: Earth Awakens

Earth Awakens by Orson Scott Card
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's not really much to say about the First Formic War trilogy. They are serviceable prequels to Ender's Game, set in the same world without the imagination, mystery, maturity, or moral ambiguity that made the original so great. The characters are just (slightly) different windows through which we see the history of Ender's Earth occur, and it unfolds as expected with very few surprises. Also unsurprising is that literally every female character serves as a love interest and their motivation doesn't go beyond mothering or loving. Even an otherwise responsible (if unremarkable) secretary gets a twist ending of "she was in love with you the whole time!" Victor's mother's storyline gets abruptly abandoned very early on in the third book as if Card didn't really know what to do with a widowed woman running a business who has no husband or child with her, but I'm fairly certain that she will end up marrying her business partner once she gets done mothering the Family. The trilogy ends with the creation of the Hegemony, which of course it had to, but all of that unfolds in about 5 minutes of audiobook and 2 days in-story - all of the details and near impossibility of getting the world to agree to that are ignored. Apparently there's going to be another trilogy about the Second Formic War. I don't know who really wants to read that, given how unexciting and predictable this war was, but maybe I'll run out of Star Wars audiobooks to listen to while I run and be disappointed with that trilogy, too.

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