Miracle of all miracles, I finished a book! 
 This is the kind of sci-fi that I can really appreciate and enjoy. It's grim and gritty and the characters are excellent and amazingly easy to sympathize with. Ender is such a spectacularly tragic figure and we get to see this portrait of destroyed childhood; not just his, but of many children, all of the children he interacts with. 
 I found that a good hunk of the middle of this one dragged. It has parts where I feel a lot like Ender and I feel tired of the monotony too. This isn't even bad writing, but it still brought the book down a little for me. 
 The ending was fantastic. I had such a different expectation in my head, but this is such a good example of how even the saddest of endings can work. It had hope.