Swear to god I'd deleted that: it was supposed to be in Natter.

I'm still online friends with most of them, although I haven't seen any of them in some time; most of them live in the midwest.

I half-liked Xenocide, if I recall; there was enough good stuff for me to feel vaguely positive about it despite the stuff that I didn't like. But Children of the Mind was awful.

It's been a while since I've read them, but this sounds like my reaction as well.

The problem with Xenocide is it was half interesting (the "Chinese" planet was pretty neat, and an sad-but-possible take on how we would self-segregate even with we spread through the galaxy) with a pretty crazy-but-fascinating premise, but the other half was insane-balls. And Children only took on the insane-balls stuff.

And, again, I felt that it was so much less consequential than Ender's Game and Speaker. It felt much more like science fiction for the sake of science fiction, rather than science fiction for the sake of telling a good story with interesting takes on society. The main plot of Children is "people learn to jump through space using the power of their mind, isn't that cool!" as opposed to "There's this boy who can save the world and he is brutally mistreated in many ways but manages to remain good throughout it and by the way there are aliens" or "After destroying a civilization by accident the boy from that other book was so distraught that he devoted his life to saving the species he almost wiped out then was able to stop some murders in the process and also fall in love. Again, there are aliens."

STOP READING!!

just for a minute.

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I finished Allegiant. Man. Not at all how I expected the series to end. I actually feel like the final book is pretty problematic. The end of the book could have been more or less achieved through other means. The mechanisms by which certain things happened seemed to contradict explanation, and the overall social/societal commentary was confusing.

This is all before I get to the really big problems with character development.

I agree with everything you just wrote, le nubian. On top of that, I had a hard time keeping track of who was narrating whatever chapter I was reading. Their voices sounded exactly the same to me.

In contrast, I just started reading Eleanor and Park, and I don't have that problem at all. (And omg, I'm only 25% into this book and I love it so much I want to hug it!)

I had a hard time keeping track of who was narrating whatever chapter I was reading

This is a BIG problem. BIG.

I recently finished Divergent ... it was good, and I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure if the following books are worth it for me.

I'd meant to post this: a photographic tour of sites from The War for the Oaks.

Toddson,

I think the 2nd book is worth it. I think you should read spoilers for the 3rd and not the actual book.