After reading Ender's Game when I was much younger, I started to check the Card section every time I went into a bookstore. This happened to be one of the first books I picked up after Ender, and it quickly became a debatable favorite. The book consists of three stories from earlier separate publications, but begins with the heart of the story. I have read the cover off this book, and it is an easy one to pick up over and over because you don't have to read the whole book, just a third of it to get a great story. The first section follows and elder Jason Worthing (who has many similarities to the great Ender) to a backwater planet where he relays the story of his life leading up to the day of pain to a young man to write down. As usual Card delivers diverse characters you believe and care about, and proves once again that he is one of the best storytellers in fiction today. Its nice to step out of the world of hyper-complex fantasy (lets face it, despite the spaceships, Card's novels always read as much like fantasy as sci-fi) storylines with hundreds of characters and races and languages into a simple but great OSC story, where the story, characters, and meaning will bring you back time and time again.

The Worthing Saga has an intersting inter-galactic plot that delves into the meaning of pain. It describes a universe in which pain has not been known for hundreds of years, and when pain returns, the ways the characters must deal with not just physical pain, but sorrow, anger and fear. When I started this book I was enticed by the idea of a universe without pain, but as I read on I was horrified by it. This is a book to be quoted from, one of Orson Scott Card's best, second only to Ender's Game.