A straight up interlude story– it ties up the loose ends from the Shadows series and performs as a nice bridge between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, but it isn’t a story so much as a series of events. It’s kind of nice to wander around with Ender again, but there’s nothing here that felt necessary.
The major subplot was neat; not quite a romance, but very true to Ender. The rest seemed… necessary– you knew he wrote The Hive Queen, so he does it here. Tasks that you already knew he tackled (because they’re mentioned in other books) make up a major portion of this book. It wasn’t a bad book by any means… it just didn’t have much of a point, other than getting to wander around in young Ender’s head again. At that, it succeeded well.