A War of Gifts

It's been some time since I had a new book in the Ender universe to read, and it was nice to get back to it, even if this story is pretty irrelevant to anything else in the overall plot. The book is comically tiny when you first see it, and I blasted through it in one sitting. Things return to battle school once more as a new student is introduced, one close to as brilliant as Ender and Bean but who refuses to participate in the Battle Room due to his strong religious beliefs. His convictions get him in a conflict with other students over the practice of their faith which is forbidden at the school, and his character arc is an interesting one considering its lack of importance to the main story of the series. I still find Orson Scott Card's prose to be wonderfully easy and enjoyable to read, and he still manages to get across complex ideas in a way that is simple to comprehend without dulling the meaning. It was a nice little snack to get me back into the groove for Ender in Exile, the newest real entry in the series that I somehow missed when it first came out late last year.