Ender's Game

So I recently dived into Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel, Ender's Game, after seeing a pretty interesting trailer while waiting for some long forgotten film in theaters. Here is a basic summary of the book in general:


"It's 2070, forty years since a devastating alien invasion was barely turned back, and the world is desperately searching for soldiers to lead them to victory when the "Buggers" come again. That's why they're drafting young children who pass a rigorous screening, and sending the best of them to the orbiting Battle School, where they are trained from childhood to be ready for war in the vertiginous reaches of space.
Into the unending pressure of military training comes six-year-old Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, who struggles to keep his humanity even as the adult teachers, rivals among his fellow students, and the strange unseen influence of the alien invaders all threaten either to destroy him or to make him into someone he can't bear to be.
His genius raises him to the top of the intensely competitive games in the Battle Room, an immense null-gravity chamber where armies of youngsters engage in mock combat. But his real struggles are off the playing field - with a dangerous older boy named Bonzo Madrid who is determined that both he and Ender cannot survive in this place; with his teacher, Mazer Rackham, who won the last war on a fluke and now is trying to prepare Ender to win the next one by skill rather than luck; and with himself, as Ender wrestles with his own demons, desperate to remain a decent human being even as he sees himself being transformed into exactly the same kind of monster as the buggers themselves."

I actually enjoyed this novel. I found that Ender was a character who was a victim of circumstance. He was a smaller child who was bullied because of his size, social status, and greater than normal intelligence. Ender only has one person he feels really cares for him and that is his older sister Valentine. She always protected Ender from their older brother, Peter, who had psychopathic tendencies and constantly threatened to kill his siblings. Ender was constantly manipulated by the adults in his life, at times he even knows he is being manipulated but he can not do anything to stop it from happening. Ender even does as far as to say, “Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth.” The adults in battle school purposely isolate him from his peers from the start by saying he is better than the other students. The other students resent Ender, because he is extremely intelligent. Ender looks at his peers and sometimes wishes he could bond with them, joking around, but he feels he can not. Because Ender begins to win every major battle, he starts to gain enemies. Ender never seeks out confrontation with the bullies, but when he is confronted he strikes out violently, believing it to be the only way he will be left alone. The whole story Ender feels guilty about his actions and no matter how much damage he does, I couldn't blame him. I felt bad for him. I feel that it was never Ender's intention to cause harm and because of that he is almost innocent in his actions. The book does become slightly tedious at times but there are many deep questions raised from this novel. 

After finishing the novel I ran across a really interesting article on the novel. Here is the link:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm