Indeed the life of Ender has nothing of a long quiet river, the third child in a family Wiggin probably overcrowded World limiting families to two children, from birth Ender has committed a fault.
Anyway classmates will ever blame him, especially Ender is not very big and maturity did skip classes. Worse, the house could have been a refuge proves to be another trial, because of his brother Peter.
Peter failed because he was not chosen by the International Force, and he wants to Ender that he may yet succeed, and his moral nonexistent does not prevent his revenge. So he continually torments her younger brother, even up to claim the kill.
As for his parents, they can only watch as the fate of their son is not theirs. Indeed Ender (or Andrew) is a project, even his birth is part of this project.
For Humanity miraculously escaped twice and the extermination of members of a chitinous alien race that claims to colonize the Earth as if it belonged to him and as if the humans were mere animals.
Earth therefore lives in a state of war, all nations are allies, a fragile alliance symbolized by the International Forces to whom all powers entrusted.
Including the one to select, manipulate or educate young children to produce tactical and strategic geniuses whose Earth needs to eradicate the threat Formic (yes I do not use the chosen translation Doryphore, scandalous, the term is Formic , which contains the concept of social insect, what these aliens).
Orson Scott Card is confiscated so we live a childhood, a very young child subjected to terrible pressures that aim to teach him that he can not rely on anyone. Family, Justice and Regulations do not provide protection because the war school officers manipulate its environment, the other students that Ender is well imbued with this lesson.
This process is even more painful Ender remains a gifted child of great empathy, which greatly suffers action that drives him to do in the name of survival.
Because ultimately that's what the War École research director in orbit, Colonel Graff, someone to love his enemy to find fault in his armor but with enough force to kill him anyway
Everything is, you guessed it, a reading of an extremely emotionally charged.
This book could have just such a description and spread into countless suites until the final confrontation, luckily it is not so and we will witness the end of this war, but also of The extent of the lies and the responsibilities that have been dumped on this child in the name of survival of the species.
We will also have the explanation of the genocidal behavior of formic apparently, one of the first attempts to describe an alien race unable to be aware of an Other.
To end on a technical note, this is a book written in 1985, published in France in 1986 but spring in large size, because of a new translation. And indeed Card has written in this universe and made a number of revisions, but the main reason seems to be the arrival of your screen adaptation of the book (~ Nov. 2013).
