This book is the first of a trilogy by Card and Johnston that predates Ender’s Game by about 100 years. I am going to assume that you have read Ender’s game, but like all my reviews, there will be no spoilers.
This was a good book. Not as good as the original but it sets up the Formic wars. Very early in the book, an object is seen /decelerating/ towards the Earth from outside of the elliptic, which means it can only be an alien vessel. We all know that the ship contains the Formics and that they come to savage the Earth, so the story is one about how it all gets set up. It is kind of like the new Star Wars trilogy that sets up Darth Vader, though hopefully it is better done. And so far I am not disappointed. Mazer Rackham is introduced and I am excited to continue following his story in the prequels.
My one issue was how the authors conflated speed and acceleration in several places in the book. Not a spoiler, but docking at 1 km/h would take the same effort as doing so at 100 km/h, yet in the book they talk about how hard it was to dock at such high speed. Relative to what? The one place where it did matter was when they were moving through a dust cloud and the dust impacting you with higher velocity would be worse for sure. But how much of that velocity is due to the ships speed vs the dusts speed? Not a major gripe, but it really bothered me in a story where they really did try to get the science right most of the time!
Looking forward to the rest of this trilogy about the 1st Formic war, and then the 2nd formic has its own trilogy as well.