Top notch readers, They breathe life into these characters.

Card's continued exploration of the ethical issues surrounding the interaction of human and non-human lifeforms; particularly, consideration of what it means to be 'human.'

Enhanced emotions and personality for the characters.

Umbo's struggle with his inner voices.

This installment was not as good as the first book . the narration is good though and the story is still interesting. Hopefully things will pickup in the next release.

Yes, overall, l think he is a good story teller

If I wanted to listen to children bickering with each other I could have closed my eyes and remembered my own trying to decide which t.v. programme they wanted to watch or which game to play. I had invested a great deal of time in the two books in the series and wanted to feel it was well spent but ultimately I didn't care what happened to any of the characters and I mean 'any'. Now I'm going to go to see my grandchildren or I'll ask my wife if she would change anything in me if she could....

The story keeps getting better and better........

I Loved the ending

I just want to know what happens next. I love the story.

The character development was not sidelined. The story was just as much about Rigg, Umbo, Param, Loaf, and Olivenko as it is about saving the world. And OSC never lets you forget that Rigg is 14. Or.. 16.. Depending on how you look at it.

Vadesh. I can't tell why without being a spoiler, but there's more to 'everybody lies to Vadesh' then meets the eye.

This is right up there with everything Rundnicki does. It took a while for Kirby to grow on me, I did not like his performance in the Alvin Maker series, but he has gotten much better, and does a much better job as the whiny brat in this series as he did in Maker. And ESC's voice is so sweet, it deserves to be in every OSC book. I just wish they could have fit Scott Brick back. Since there was no Point of View from Ram Odin, I guess that's why he's not there.

It did make me laugh out loud several times, especially the relationship between Umbo and Param. When Umbo tried to philosophize about peeing while skipping forward through time, it was so...Umbo...that I just couldn't help it.

While there's heavy sci-fi in this series, it is not very serious, and if that is something that you must have then you might not like it too much. But I seriously doubt any Orson Scott Card fan has that expectation. Now Mr. Card, get into gear and finish Ender, and finish Alvin Maker. I'm so mad at you for leaving Alvin Maker hanging for so long.. Two have made me cry and my life, the first was Fahrenheit 451 and the second was Bean's death in Shadow's in flight... You stand in good company.

Well, after waiting a year and a half for this book, I have to say it both meets my expectations and falls short in a few areas. It is definitely a different book than Pathfinder. Whereas the first book reads much like a fantasy story at first, where you know next to nothing about the world, this book is all about answers, or at least figuring them out. Almost everything we learned in the first book gets challenged or turned on its head. This book keeps you in fascination at the layers and layers of truth and mystery and history revealed, while being a time travel romp across many more lands than we saw in Pathfinder. The book ends well too, with a gripping end scene and a good setup for the end.

Like other reviewers though, I felt that there was a bit too much distrust in the characters this time. It's funny because I didn't really see that developing in the first book. I feel almost as though the author needed to beef up the book's size and so he put in tons and tons of inner thoughts and doubts in the characters. I also found a lot of similarities between this series and the Ender series because of that. Rigg has many personality similarities to Ender, and even the plot reuses a lot of themes from Speaker for the Dead, such as concepts of impending planetary destruction, genocide and the price of winning. Maybe it's just because I listened to it recently too, but I felt a lot of the common Card themes come back into play here.

Overall I enjoyed this book and this series as much as I have the Ender series, and I can't wait for the conclusion of the story.