posted
Found it at my local used paperback bookstore, didn't have it in my collection, and figured yeah why not.
I thought the first 3-4 chapters were incredible. Uncle Orson is always good with characters, but I was in awe of the sister/brother relationship, the interactions with Mom/Dad. It was tremendously moving.
Then it got weird. Which of course was the purpose of the story. Before it was over, I thought I was reading Stephen King. Not sure if Uncle Orson will want to hear that, but hey...
Overall, I was glad I read it. It was a bit out of the norm for OSC, at least what I've read so far.
Anyone else feel like this was close to a King book, or am I the only one?
IIRC, OSC has said that maybe he went a little to far with that in having it be a story about witches and then make it a ghost story as well.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as any other OSC I've read. I enjoyed the writing. It was good OSC. But I'm not a fan of that type of story. It was King-like.
Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Then you may very well enjoy some King, especially his short stories and possibly Rose Madder.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Yeah, King is not bad. Read 'Four Past Midnight', some really good novellas, with differing varieties.
Basically, I love his non-horror stuff. I only can stomach a few of his horrors (Pet Cementary being the best).
The Green Mile, Stand by Me, and Shawshank Redemption??? Come on those are awesome stories!
... anyway, back to OSC. The only book of his that I started and just couldn't get into was 'Pastwatch'. I liked the premise, but for whatever reason couldn't get into it. Maybe I'll try again soon.
Posts: 176 | Registered: Sep 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Do try again. I had the same problem of having a hard time getting into it, but once I did, I loved it. It starts out slow but really picks up. There are some pretty sweet little twists.
Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't ever write the same book twice. So for a book to "seem like Card," it better not seem like my other books. Or I failed.
If Stephen King chooses to imitate me, I can't stop him. <grin>
Seriously: King didn't invent the ghost story. But I've NEVER seen him work with the spirits of the dead, period. If Treasure Box resembles anything, it's probably some of the work of Dean Koontz. But I hadn't started reading Koontz at the time I came up with Treasure Box.
It comes down to this: There's nothing new under the sun.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Dr Strangelove: Do try again. I had the same problem of having a hard time getting into it, but once I did, I loved it. It starts out slow but really picks up. There are some pretty sweet little twists.
Agreed. It's a GREAT book. I just finished it last month, and I loved it, although I also found it hard to get into...initially, at least.
Posts: 1006 | Registered: Jun 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Treasure Box was definitely a bit different from OSC's normal work. But I enjoyed it. I liked Homebody as well. IMO, if it had been a King book, it would have been about 400 pages longer and filled with stuff not important to the story. King's short stories are better, it's almost as if it sets a natural boundary so that he can't ramble on with unimportant stuff.
Posts: 1042 | Registered: Jan 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Orson Scott Card: I don't ever write the same book twice. So for a book to "seem like Card," it better not seem like my other books. Or I failed.
Psh. If you wrote differently, you would have to be writing worse, since, in my humble opinion, you're the best sci-fi writer alive today (sorry, but H.G. Wells trumps you. IMO). So I sure hope you always "seem like Card".
Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Orson Scott Card: I don't ever write the same book twice. So for a book to "seem like Card," it better not seem like my other books. Or I failed.
How do you explain Ender's Shadow then?
Posts: 1042 | Registered: Jan 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I liked Treasure Box for the weird family dynamics and the snark. OSC writes an amazing cat fight .
King wrote a novel called Bag of Bones that deals with spirits of the dead. It was written after Treasure Box. Coincidence?!?!?
Posts: 1676 | Registered: Jul 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Orson Scott Card: I don't ever write the same book twice. So for a book to "seem like Card," it better not seem like my other books. Or I failed.
How do you explain Ender's Shadow then?
what are you asking? how does he explain the differences or the similarities? i for one thought the entire 'shadow' series was vastly different from the parallel 'ender' series.
Posts: 34 | Registered: Dec 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
I read Ender's Game first, but after I read Ender's Shadow, I honestly wasn't sure which was "better". I think Card did succeed in making them substantially different; the basic story structure and some of the scenes were the same, of course (though even then, being from Bean's point of view, there was a whole new wrinkle to our understanding of what was going on) but the actual moral dilemmas faced by Bean and Ender were quite different. The story of how Achilles formed his new family on the street was, I though, pretty powerful as well.
Posts: 1595 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I loved "Ender's Shadow" and I loved "Ender's Game" and I think the biggest reason you can't say which is better is because they ARE two different books. They follow the same story line, but the issues of importance are ultimately very different. Bean and Ender do not struggle over the same issues, thus the things the books focus on are completely different. That is like saying that if you read the diaries of Grand and Lee you were reading the same book. In fact, Grant and Lee's diaries were probably more similar than the two battleschool books.
Anyway, I found Treasurebox facinating. I thurougly enjoyed it, but I cannot say it is one of my favorite OSC books. For one thing, I don't think it is a book I can re-read very many times, since very much of what made it such a good book was the suspense and surprise. That's not really "usual" in most of what I've read by Card, because half the books I have read by him, I've re-read enough times to have dreams about them.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by stihl1: Ender's Shadow is the same book, more or less, and basically cheapens Ender's Game, imo.
<blink> You're...
I was going to say that you're out of your mind, or something like that, but then it occured to me that anyone with such a lack of imagination that seeing a story from a different angle cheapens the original story for him is just going to get all huffy that someone noticed what a whack job he is.
quote:IIRC, OSC has said that maybe he went a little to far with that in having it be a story about witches and then make it a ghost story as well.
I disagree with OSC about that. I think Treasure Box was spot on. Since the main power of the witches was to see the spirits, I didn't see it as going too far, not like trying to have a story about vampires *and* aliens or something. IMO, it was all part of the same singular fantastical element, so it totally worked.
Posts: 454 | Registered: Mar 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Ender's Shadow is the same book, more or less, and basically cheapens Ender's Game, imo.
Ender's Shadow is a very, very different book from Ender's Game. If you think that they are the same, I think you may have missed the point, which is really a shame because ES is a wonderful book.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by stihl1: Ender's Shadow is the same book, more or less, and basically cheapens Ender's Game, imo.
i totally disagree. after reading enders shadow, i was very suprised at how different the entire book is. even the tone OSC writes with is different, sort of... almost easier read. the shadow series seemed more like a simple Tom Clancy story then OSC usual. which i appreciated. i consider it a completly different book, and i applaud OSC specifically for not ruining enders game with useless overlap. generally parallel stories suck, not so with shadow.
Posts: 34 | Registered: Dec 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by stihl1: Ender's Shadow is the same book, more or less, and basically cheapens Ender's Game, imo.
<blink> You're...
I was going to say that you're out of your mind, or something like that, but then it occured to me that anyone with such a lack of imagination that seeing a story from a different angle cheapens the original story for him is just going to get all huffy that someone noticed what a whack job he is.
No offense.
You have every right to disagree with me, that's fine. It doesn't make either one of us a whack job. IMO, which means in my opinion, EG was a great book and fine in its own right. ES took everything that was great about EG, and told you it didn't happen that way. Particularly the fact that it was this one little boy, Andrew, that went up against the system, and excelled above and beyond what everyone's expectations were. Ender was the hero in the book. It set the tone for the other books in that series, in which everything revolves around him as the hero figure. 15 years later, we get another book that tells us it wasn't in fact a 10 year old that outsmarted everyone, it was the smarter 6 year old that helped behind the scenes and set the stage for Ender. Which cheapens the book, for me. I'm sure if I read ES first I might look at everything differently. But I didn't, and I can't take ES as a seperate story in its own right. EG was fine, the Ender universe was fine without another dip into the barrel. I believe in this case, less was more, and I lost a lot of respect for OSC for going back to the Ender's universe well to write these stories. Which are no where near as good as the first 3 books in the original series.
Berate me if you must, but that's the way I see it. I have no problem with you seeing it otherwise. But my comment came from the fact that OSC said he tries not to write the same story twice, and in fact I think he did write EG twice. Second time around the details were different and the kid was younger, but it was the same story as EG and I don't believe EG needed re-writing. It was fine the first time.
Posts: 1042 | Registered: Jan 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Well to address your issues I would say that Ender's Shadow did not say it was really Bean that did everything. All Bean really did in relation to Ender is come up with Ender's roster and in Ender's Game Ender notices the abilities of his armies at one point and wonders wheather it is his fantastic abilities as a commander or wheather he was given an exceptional army to begin with. Ender's Shadow gives us the answer which is both.
Also Bean looks at life completely different than Ender. Ender knew how people worked and how to lead them, Bean was brilliant but could not interact well with peers. He could never be the commander that Ender was.
Finally the look at how children act towards eachother in a completely parentless situation where they fight for survival on the streets of Roterdam was terribly interesting and eye opening.
Now that Ive said all that i'm going to get back onto the main stream thread about Treasure box.
It was definatly more Dean Koontz than Steven King. Paranormal but within guidelines and cleaner than King's novels.
Now onto my stoning. Im going to go out on a limb and say that my two favorite authors are Orson Scott Card and Stephen King. They write very differently but have one similarity that makes them both excellent authors. They both make the story around the characters, not the characters around the story. The reason Stephen King is so good at horror is that the reader truly cares about what happens to the characters in his novels. And in Orson Scott Card's books most of the books ride on the characters. Try looking at Ender's Game without Ender in it. There is nothing left.
So with that said please don't hate me for comparing Orson Scott Card to Stephen King. Posts: 832 | Registered: Jan 2005
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Which of course was the purpose of the story. Before it was over, I thought I was reading Stephen King. Not sure if Uncle Orson will want to hear that, but hey...
