Author:	Orson Scott Card
Copyright:	1996
Date Reviewed:	9/1/00
Rating:	4.0

This is the forth and hopefully the last book in the Ender series. While the first book was a landmark in the science fiction genre, each subsequent book was progressively worse. "Children of the Mind" is painfully slow and redundant. The story opens with the Lusitania fleet, sent by the Starways Congress to destroy Lusitania and any trace of the descaloda virus that still inhabits the planet. Ender's created brother Peter and Si-Wang Mu from the last book travel all over the galaxy trying to find someone who can stop the fleet. Meanwhile, the Starways Congress is also shutting down the ansible network where Jane's conscious resides. Through the almost magical efforts of the Hive Queens and Fathertrees, a small part of Jane's conscious is saved in Ender's created sisters, while the rest resides in the Mothertrees network. Here she regains enough of her power to stop the fleet and restore the network.

Although Ender has a small role and dies in the end, much of the book has other characters telling his story over and over again as if he were a god or a profit. The miniscule plot involves live on Lusitania but there is almost no references to the book about the planet which made much of the story hard to follow. "Children of the Mind" was incredibly tedious and may have turned me off of Card for a long time.