Petra sighed, "I suppose this proves I'm not in Kansas anymore."
"I don't believe," said Lankowski, "that you have ever been in Kansas, Mrs. Delphiki."
"It was a reference to—"
"I have seen The Wizard of Oz," said Lankowski. "I am, after all, an educated man. And... I have been in Kansas."
I have read Pg 75-210, though the book has now slowed to a crawl for multiple reasons, mainly due to SCOTT GOWIN (please kill him in the most painful way, and fail him forever) giving away the ending. (I am finding it extremely hard to move on knowing that certain thing are going to happen, and am probably going to switch to the enders game series and read one or two books and then come back to this.) The plot summary for these pages might be slightly hard to follow without reading the two previous books, but here it is. Bean, Petra, and their families and a few others have left the headquarters of the Hegemony because the Hegemon has ordered the live capture of Achilles, who is basically a psycho who has somewhat taken over half the world and will kill anyone who has seen him in any form of weak state where he is not in control. The Hegemon (Peter) tried to—against everything everyone told him about Achilles—get Achilles to side with him and help take down the regime that was created under him. As everyone (but Peter) knew would happen, the plan backfired and Peter had to escape Achilles from his own HQ. He was invited to stay in the US and had to quickly make a press release, as Achilles said he had embezzled world funds (the Hegemony is a world organization connected to almost every country). That happened over the coarse of months until him escaping, which only took two days, the first being traveling covertly, and the second being the press conference. While this was happening, Bean and Petra were basically traveling around the world doing nothing, because Bean was too paranoid to settle anywhere to start making any actions to kill Achilles and help Peter (and the world). Petra finally got Bean to start taking actions, and finally got Bean to show affection to her (Bean knows he will die soon due to him having a genetically engineered super mind and body, and didn't want to leave a wife and children). They got married and had embryos made that were thought to have been anti-genetically engineered, but it was a hoax—there was a chance that the embryos had beans short life and incredible mind—and they were stolen by Achilles, though one was implanted in Petra. Shortly prior to the embryo incident, they were the ones who sent Peter the message to escape, because they found that the intel that Peter received about Achilles being moved to a prison camp (in a vulnerable convoy) was actually leaked out by Achilles posing as a battle school graduate. The battle school graduate was the one that sent Bean and Petra the info about Achilles posing as him. After this they narrowly escaped from the guys who took the embryos, and then were whisked away to the middle east by another of their old battle school friends, who through one event after another, became the leader of the Muslim world. The conversation above was between petra and the man who escorted her from the plane to Alai (the leader of the Muslim world). This all happens linearly, as in it keeps the same timeline and does not finish Peter's part of the story and then go back in time and tell Bean and Petra's side like the way I summarized. Everything intertwines and it would be extremely hard to go back and forth and this would be quite a long summary (as if it isn't already).
I found a lot of references to current and past pop culture in his writing, and also a lot of major historical events. The Wizard of Oz is the most obvious, and around that time there are also a few about the current war on terror, though it was published in 2002 (and written before then) so it's more probable that the references were to Desert Storm or what he might have thought the current conflict would have turned into. It was kind of strange because Petra's escort was talking about how the Muslims were above "non-holy wars", and he talked about the old generation of fight, but one thing he said was, "Yes, we did not have guided missiles, but we did have feet." I found out that this wasn't really a common trend at all until the current struggle, and not really until after the book was published (there were a lot more car bombs and other non-suicide acts until a bit later, or at least that's what it seemed like to me). There is a lot of dark humor in this series (Enders Shadow) compared to it's sister series, and the religion issues seem much broader (more religions) than in the sister series and even prior books of this series.
I have a lot to go on for my thesis ideas, and right now I am thinking too much (the religion ideas are many, but he seems to change his views or maybe just his ways of displaying them in every book). And once again I can't think of a way to end something I've written.....
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Seacrest, out.
