Orson Scott Card
Somehow I managed to pick great books to read on my vacation. Ender’s Game is a fun novel about the life of a child prodigy bred in a military program to find a commander to win a war against the buggers, aliens from a far away galaxy who threaten the entire human existence.
Ender, or Andrew Wiggin, is a six year old boy who has had a device connected to his brainstem allowing military recruiters to monitor every minute of his life to date. Both his older siblings have failed to meet the recruiters expectations, and when Ender has his monitor removed one day in school, he thinks that he’s failed too.
But after school gets out, a few of his classmates block his way to the bus, teasing and threatening him. He does what he feels necessary, and later that day a military man comes to his door to take him away to Battle School, where the smartest and best children in the world to to begin their training in the world’s army.
The book takes an interesting look at power, and the implications it raises. The way Ender is manipulated by the Battle School so that he accomplishes their primary goal, without even knowing. You can’t decide whether Ender is good or evil, right or wrong, more like his sister or his brother. But since he joined Battle School, he has had power, and struggled with the fact that although it let him do good things, it also forced him to do evil.