text: It's a bad idea to create a character-driven sci-fi when your characters are this annoying.  The majority of Children of the Mind consists of inane dialogue between characters that are impossible to care about.  The characters are so one-dimensional and predictable that you already know what they'll say before they say it.  Peter says nothing except smart alecky remarks, Val spends the whole book whining loudly about not being a real person, Novinha is as crazy and hard-headed as she's been for the last two books, and Ender spouts off a bunch of trite, up-with-people garbage every chance he gets.  Somehow, Card even managed to make Jane more irritating than my ex-girlfriend during PMS.  The only decent characters in this book are Miro and Wang Mu, and they aren't nearly enough to save the story.
  
  I admit it: I only made it a little over half-way through Children of the Mind.  I couldn't take the dialogue anymore.  That's not to mention the ridiculous plot, which centers on two children warping around the universe, engaging in philosophical discussions with caricatures of Japanese and Polynesian culture, in an attempt to avert a war between species.
  
  If you're that curious to learn how the Ender Quartet concludes, do what I should've done from the beginning: find a plot synopsis somewhere and save yourself the pain of reading this garbage
  