Author: Orson Scott Card
Title: A War of Gifts
Publisher: Tor Books
Date: 2007
Hardcover
126 pages
ISBN-10: 0765312824
ISBN-13: 978-0765312822
$12.95

Card, Orson Scott. _A War of Gifts_. (2007) New York: Tor Books. 126 pp. $12.95 hardback (pocketbook size). Reviewed by Jonathan Langford

One chapter. That's all it took, and then I was flipping to the back of the book, reading the story backwards, chapter by chapter, because I had started caring too much about the characters and what happened to them, and I couldn't bear to wait and let the story unfold in its own way.

This is the story of Zeck, the young son of a fundamentalist preacher in the Ender universe. Like so many of Card's fictional children, he's a brilliant boy with a gift. He believes his father's teachings. And so when he's sent to the Battle School, as a dedicated pacifist, it's his job--as he sees it--to do whatever he has to in order to get back home again to North Carolina.

Except, of course, that there's much more to it than that. This little book--and it's a very little book, with small pages and large type, suitable for reading in an hour or less--is about loss and separation, grace and forgiveness, the terrible things we sometimes do to each other within our families and outside our families, and the wonderful things that we sometimes do as well.

Card's characterization, as always, is impeccable. We get a chance to spend some more time with familiar characters from the Ender universe--a little with Ender himself, who is possibly just a bit too good to be true in this story (but not much), and more of Dink, one of my favorite characters from the earlier stories.

The trope of the abusive preacher is one that's been done pretty often. I'm not sure we really needed another story presenting this idea--and I'm not sure that I buy Card's exegesis of Zech's father's morality and motivations: how he preaches a gospel of peace as a way of trying to talk himself out of abusing Zech. But then, I'm no expert on abuse and the mindsets that lead to it. And there's no question but that as a reader, I feel strongly for Zech's dilemma: trying to do what he thinks is right, acting out of motivations that he has never really allowed himself to examine too closely.

In the end, the feeling I come away with is a wish to know more about Zeck's character and what happens to him later on. I don't remember encountering him in any of the other stories. Perhaps someday we'll read his story (or perhaps it's out there already; I haven't stayed caught up on everything Card has published the last few years).

A few other notes...

Given the small length of the overall story, most readers probably won't want to purchase this book as a stand-alone hardcover. (I got my copy from the local library.) I suspect--or at least I hope--that smaller stories like this will make an appearance sometime as part of a larger anthology.

It's also unclear to me whether or not this story has been previously published online. A page listing Tor books by Orson Scott Card in the front of the book includes the message, "New Ender's Universe stories in every issue of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show at oscigms.com." I went there and found a link to a story titled "Ender's Stocking" which (in the few excerted paragraphs that I could read as a nonsubscriber) duplicated part of _A War of Gifts_ (a section dealing with Peter Wiggin that doesn't have a clear relationship to the rest of the plot)--but with some changes. Without reading the entire story, I wasn't able to get a clear sense of just what the relationship was between the two stories.

Overall, I was quite satisfied with this story. The great worry, when an author has a popular and well-loved franchise such as the Ender universe to explore, is that the author may choose to continue telling stories from that setting after the original inspiration has grown stale. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case here. I'll continue reading stories from Ender's universe with pleasure, so long as they remain as good and as enjoyable as this one.