Ender's Shadow

Written from secondary sources (reference descriptions of the novel), not from the text.

A 1999 novel that runs alongside Ender’s Game: the same war and the same Battle School, seen by Bean, the smallest child in Ender’s army. Bean starts as a starving street kid in Rotterdam who survives on his intelligence alone, and the book is about what that intelligence costs him.

In Rotterdam he talks a gang leader, Poke, into hiring a protector. The protector, Achilles, takes the gang over and kills her. Sister Carlotta, a nun recruiting for the International Fleet, spots Bean and gets him into Battle School over the institution’s doubts. There he is measured against Ender from the first day, and he learns that his mind is engineered: a genetic change keeps his brain and body growing without stopping, and the price is an early death. In this telling, the last battle turns on Bean’s prompt to Ender.

The common complaint about a parallel novel applies here. Writing Bean as sharper than Ender, and as the hand behind some of Ender’s wins, can read as taking something from the first book. Four sequels follow Bean after the war.