Torn on this one. Card writes very ambitiously for children, expecting them to keep up with a lot of information that's bound to be way over their heads, and usually that's an excellent thing. In "Pathfinder", I felt like something was missing, or something was too much. Mainly that the characters were drawn in big hacking brushmarks, while the time-travel was a little blinding. I came away interested in the themes (well, -ish), and sort of baffled by the actual plot.

I've just reread "Ender's Game" and it holds up brilliantly from when I was a teenager. And though I appreciated Graff and Sister Carlotta ("Ender's Shadow", mostly) when I was a kid, now I love them. Their banter is fantastic, sharp and witty but also restrained, and the sly asides and parries made me laugh out loud as I read. Unfortunately, here ALL of the characters speak to each other in that same sharp, edgy language, and it loses its charm when it's used so frequently. I just don't believe that everyone in this universe either speaks in that sort of way or understands how to respond to it, especially the book's children. So that's one hurdle: everyone in the book is sarcastic and witheringly witty, and when they're all like that it's no fun. It's not real.

Card writes very political characters, and their emotions are buried under intellect and logic. It's a cool way of writing, but it's a one-trick pony when your characters are then removed from a political or emotional situation. In "Pathfinder", there's a lot of watching and not much maneuvering, and that's a problem when you rely on action or reaction to give characters dimension.

And now, the time-travel bit: Okay. Depending on your generation, you have probably used the back of a napkin to draw out the timelines for either "Back to the Future" or the new "Star Trek" movie. This book spends a lot of time figuring that same sort of timeline math out, and it tries to bring the reader along for the ride. Is this effective for kids who've never really grappled with paradox theories or time travel scenarios? No idea. But I found it pretty difficult to chart out the timelines (as it was being discussed by the characters) at the same time as the plot was moving forward. They float a lot of theories, and then disprove them, and it feels like chaff thrown in the wind for no real reason.

It's a very odd choice, to spend so much of the book reading about two kids mulling over time travel as an intellectual exercise. The book grinds to a halt time and again to do this. There's no action, no real urgency to push this experimentation from a plotting standpoint - Card basically ditches any pretense of plot to just ramble. And at the end, it turns out the math is about the same as my back-of-the-napkin Marty McFly conclusions. After 500 pages of extended discussion, it's sort of like getting excited about opening a giant box on Christmas and finding out your brother actually just did the box-in-a-box-in-a-box trick, so instead of getting a bike you end up holding a pair of socks.

All in all I'd say this isn't so much a story about a time-travelling kid, it's much more a basic and usable theory of time travel that's inexplicably been dressed up with lots of flair, with various characters scattered about to prop up the plot. I think Card just wanted to talk about time travel, and if you were sitting next to him he'd probably be able to sneak about 40% of the book's lines into normal conversation about paradoxes without anyone being the wiser. Lecture-as-fiction, and I don't think it worked too well. Apparently it's going to be a series, so we'll see what happens now that everyone seems to have sorted out their superpowers - but I really hope the characters get a little more life to them, and the political exercises take a break until there's more doing than watching.