Pathfinder is centered on Rigg, a thirteen year old boy who lives an isolated life hunting and poaching with his enigmatic father. Rigg has a strange ability; he can see paths, tracks in time that are remnants of every living thing ever to have lived. The only person whose path he cannot see is his father's, who dies one day in an accident. His father's last wish is for Rigg to find the sister he never knew he had. This leads Rigg to undergo a fascinating journey, with every step of the way leading him to uncover more secrets about his father and his own special abilities. Meanwhile, in a parallel story, there is Ram, another young man with mysterious abilities, who is responsible for a time-traveling ship searching for a new home in the universe.

Owww. This book made my brain hurt. There is time-traveling, parallel time lines, paradoxes, and all other sorts of sci-fi fun. In order to get the full effect of the story, you have to work with it, actively putting pieces together as you go along. I loved that. I was able to crack the mystery about how the two stories come together half-way through the book, but it took a lot of deduction on my part. Also, nothing is ever as simple as "magic". There is a specific convoluted scientific reasons for all the special abilities in the book, which Card does not hesitate to dive into. Dude, books like this make me feel stupid. How do people think of this stuff! It did not help that the main characters were geniuses in their own right. My favorite part of this book was easily the story itself. It was well-concieved and quite epic. Although the book is over 600 pages long, the pages flip by relatively quickly if you don't get too hung up on trying to figure out the finer point of the space-time continuum.

I've only read one other book by Orson Scott Card, the famous Ender's Game, and I saw some definite similarities. They both had adolescent main characters with a genius IQ and intense responsibilities, and the writing was quite the same. The dialogue was witty, and the characters were fun, but I never really felt connected with the story. This happens to me often with third-person narration. The characters can be perfectly well-developed and complex, but if its in 3rd-person, I just don't feel emotionally invested. Card's writing was also cool and calculating, much like his characters, and didn't lend much to descriptions. I still don't have any idea what the characters look like except for the vaguest notions, and the scenery was pretty much left entirely to the imagination.

Overall, this was a great read for lovers of YA sci-fi, and while this novel had some sense of closure, I can't wait to see what is next in the trilogy. Hopefully, Card remains in good enough health to finish it.