shadow puppets by orson scott card is the penultimate book in the whole ender saga, or so we’ve been led to believe. i think i agree with the reviewer on amazon that calls it a punctuation mark in the series. it’s fairly lackluster, and that makes the biggest flaw of this last part of the series stand out — the geopolitics are absolutely ludicrous.

there’s less of the bean-as-brilliant-mindreader schtick, which is a very good thing, but none of the characters are particularly strong in the book.