Shadow of the Giant concludes the long-drawn global conflict for leadership of, basically, planet Earth whilst the International Fleet expands the human race into the stars. Bean and Petra are the focus of the story, now searching for their missing children and assisting Hegemon Peter Wiggin in uniting every country under the Free People of Earth (FPE), as they struggle with the gigantism syndrome. Opposing them are Virlomi, whose reality is blurring with her power-hungry persona as the Indian goddess; Alai, struggling Caliph surrounded by pressurising advisors; and Han 'Hot Soup' Zhu, making up for China's past shortcomings with a Mandate from Heaven. All of this is supervised by Graff and Rackham, who also offer all battle school graduates light-speed leadership of offworld colonies. The ending felt suprisingly emotional, with Card doing characters justice after spending so long with them, and overall the world politics whilst feeling slightly recycled did engage me throughout.

I tried really hard to like this one. I was able to get past the intensely conservative ideas about marriage in the last book. This one not only goes even more overboard with them, it clearly showed Card's crazy hatred of Islam and Muslims. "Islam has never learned how to become a religion. It's a tyranny by its very nature." Are you kidding me? You could have made the Islamic Empire a villain in the book without writing entire essays (not kidding, there were pages and pages of this BS) about how Islam is an awful religion or how Islam doesn't deserve to be a religion or how Muslims are blood thirsty maniacs without brains. Such bullshit. But, I'll still read the last book, despite reading reviews about how awful it is. But this book made me lose respect for the author.