This book is excruicatingly bad. All the characters speak with the same exact style of voice. A half-formal, half-scarcastic (but never genuinely funny) monotone. Card's earlier works in the Ender series were great, with characters you can care about. Here, it feels like we're at a dinner party with George Lucas and Orson Scott Card talking about their past triumphs, revisiting them, and in the end ruining them through boredom and pretentiousness. I can't believe how much yapping there is about stupid political situations. It could have worked if they didn't sound utterly made up, with a "And then the main characters were 100% right and guessed all the right answers" tacked on at the end.And the audiobook version: The characters speak as if everything they say is super-important and must be said in a whiny whisper. Chapters are separated by the cheesiest music I have every heard this side of an elevator.