Earthborn Book Review (Homecoming #5)

Indexed: 2026-05-22

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[00:00:09]Hello and welcome to my channel. My name is Jonathan Cone and today I have my book review of the book Earthborn by Orson Scott Card. This is the fifth and final book in the Memory of Earth Saga.

[00:00:22]This was a series that absolutely started incredibly. It's a series about people from humans who had migrated to the planet Harmony 40 million years, lived there and then this kind of AI called the Oversoul kind of convinces a small group, a dedicated group to come back to Earth. And so we start the series with the Memory of Earth, which was just fantastic. And then we had the Call of Earth, which was even better.

[00:00:51]This was just an incredible [snorts] book, best book of the series. And the series book was never the same. Book three was a great book, just not as good as the first two, but it's still a pretty entertaining read. And then I would say the cracks in the series really started to be seen in Earthfall.

[00:01:09]I really enjoyed it, but I could see the cracks already starting to form in book four when it really started to take a bit of a turn. And so we have book five and I was mainly interested in reading this for two reasons. One is I'd read four out of five books already, in for a penny, in for a pound, may as well read the fifth one. I'm an excessive, compulsive completionist often times. I have no problem if I read book one of a big series and being like it's not for me and not continuing. If I've read four books in the series and there's a fifth book, I'm like, I I I need to I need to keep going with it.

[00:01:45]Sometimes I don't do that, but usually I do and so that was the main reason I wanted to continue even though I had a feeling where it was going to go.

[00:01:52]The other reason is there's a major plot issue that was not resolved that I knew would be resolved in this book, which is who / what is the keeper of Earth and what's their plan for the Oversoul?

[00:02:06]And the keeper of Earth is basically the person who created the Oversoul and was responsible for it and was responsible for the whole impetus of the whole series. Yes, the Oversoul brought humans back to Earth, but that's only because the keeper of Earth did it. And so that's the main reason I was wanting to read this book.

[00:02:22]But I I knew going into it it was going to be a weird experience and I hoped it would be a good weird experience.

[00:02:29]But I didn't have But I didn't hope too much. The ending of book four ties just really quickly, really abruptly ties up the stories of the whole cast of Nephi and Elaim and all their factions and stuff. And the first four books follow all of that cast.

[00:02:47]If you exclude the Oversoul, which is an AI, only one character transfers over from the first four to this character at the end of this book, and that's Shidemi. And Shidemi's the character who basically survives on the the Oversoul has given her the cloak and she's basically in hibernation up on the ship that's orbiting Earth now. And it's much like if you've read the Shannara series by Terry Brooks. If you've read the Shannara series, you know that some of the druids will basically go into this hibernation state and sleep for a couple hundred years and then pop up when they need to be woken up. And so that way they live a really abnormally long period of time. That's basically what happens to Shidemi in this book is the Oversoul can continually heal her and then the fact that she goes under for so long basically gives her essentially immortality. And so this book she's the only carried through character. So the whole rest of the cast is new, is set at least hundreds. We don't know the exact date, but it's at least hundreds of years after the events of Earthfall, the end of Earthfall. And basically, uh humanity that is now on Earth has split up into some different factions. You have the factions that are slaves to the Earth people, which the Earth people are basically rats. You have those who are living in harmony with the bat people, which are known as the Sky people, and I have to totally not think of Avatar when I say Sky people. And then, you have the group that's kind of wanting to live alone.

[00:04:19]And basically, the group the first two the the the the two groups that are not slaves basically go and start rescuing the people who are slaves, and there's also this great uh discussion in the book about the themes of recompensing for sins, sins of the father.

[00:04:38]There's great themes about the idea of following God's will, however it however it works. Uh in this case, they call it the the Keeper of Earth's will. And it's such a fascinating theme discussion.

[00:04:51]But the story is just so uninteresting.

[00:04:55]The themes are incredible, the story just not incredible. And then, you also at the same time, Shidemi is kind of watching over humanity, and she and the Oversoul basically decide that they're going to try to force the Keeper of Earth's hand. They're going to try to set up a situation in which the Keeper of Earth would have to act so that he can he or she can reveal themselves to uh Shidemi and the Oversoul so that they can A, finally understand the Keeper of Earth, but also so that the Oversoul can finally get its marching orders so that it can go back to Harmony, the planet that they were from before, and so that Shidemi can basically die in peace. She feels she can't die in peace until she finally meets the Keeper of Earth.

[00:05:40]And you do get that ending here. It is extremely brief when it actually like happens. There's one chapter in here and it's only part of the chapter that you finally get the answers to the Keeper of Earth. And it makes logical sense. It was in no way surprising to me and it was perfectly logical and in fact thematically worked for what Orson Scott Card did.

[00:06:07]But at the same time, it was very unsatisfying because it was frustrating that he made you wait five books to get an answer that you could have predicted in books one or two.

[00:06:18]And also uh the the the conclusion is done with Shedemi who is a okay character is and is you know was was more anchored to us than any of the other characters in this book, but it should have been to Nafai in Earthfall. In fact, this is how I would change it. What I would do is I would scrap book five altogether, take the the the sequence the stuff that has to do with the Keeper of Earth fold that into the story of Earthfall and then add on 50 or 100 pages to do the epic showdown between Nafai and Ela Max's forces that happens at the end. Basically, the couple of pages here kind of breezes through what happens with Nafai and Ela Max's forces and if he had actually fleshed that out and had tacked on the Keeper of Earth story, not only would this have been a much better book in its own right, not only would the series feel extremely satisfying, but you wouldn't have this entire book, which is the longest book in the series, by the way. The rest of the books are like under 400 pages pretty much and they're all, you know, much shorter like with like word count and whatnot. This is a much longer book and it feels very tacked on and so you wouldn't have even had this feeling and the series would have ended on an extremely high note. Instead, the series kind of ends on a whimper. To the point that I'd say, read the first four, worth it, stop at book four. I I'm sorry to say I don't think that people should continue to Burke book five. And here's what's most tragic about this.

[00:07:55]The book This book is most tragic because it's not bad. It's not like that I was reading this and being like, that doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. It's not like I was reading it and being like, oh man, this is, you know, uh you know, the wrong decision to make in in every case. The problem was it just wasn't satisfying and it just didn't hook me. It kept me interested enough to keep reading, but not interested enough that I was liking what I was reading. It was extremely mediocre. It is the definition of that meme that goes, I mean, it's all right, like. It is just so frustrating that a series that starts so well ends so meh.

[00:08:41]And I don't think it had to be this way.

[00:08:43]It did not have to be this way. And in fact, if Orson Scott Card felt so strongly about the themes and about the story he wanted selling this book, which I think could work, here's how I would do it. I would have wrapped everything up in the first arc and then do like a trilogy or another four-book arc featuring this storyline or some other storyline and flesh it out even more and the uh release it years later and make it a separate arc. And then that way the series would feel like, oh, you have a whole complete first part and a whole complete second part. But instead, what you have is you have a first four and the the fourth book doesn't have a satisfying an ending it should have had, and then you have fifth book and you're like, what what what what? That's really weird. It is just such such bizarre storytelling. Now, this does not negate how I feel about my enjoyment of the first four books, particularly the first two, which I think are amazing. I still think that Orson Scott Card's creativity, his way of fusing the Bible and the Book of Mormon into his story is just incredible. The way he deals with themes, and again, that's what's keeping this book up and not being just like a really bad book was I was so intrigued by the themes that he's exploring in this book. So, Orson Scott Card has some incredible creativity and imagination to him.

[00:10:04]But, just the choices here were just not the choices to write choices to end the series. And it's just painful for me to to to feel that way about this series.

[00:10:15]I still, if I'm thinking about the series as a whole, it's still I still very much liked it and I will recommend the first couple of books.

[00:10:22]But, I will be telling people just to read the first four and not read the the fifth one.

[00:10:28]And so, I'm going to say my rating of this is a five out of 10. It is a meh.

[00:10:33]Not great. Not good. It's not incompetent. And there were parts of it that were entertaining to me, but as a whole, it was so unsatisfying that it just gets dragged down. And so, it's a if you're a completionist or if you're a Orson Scott Card mega fan or if you are the type of person that you just have to know what happened to the with the Keeper of Earth stuff, maybe read this book. However, I would say read the first four and maybe Google if if it if it is out there on Google what happened to the Keeper of Earth and what is the Keeper of Earth and or or you you could do, cuz this is pretty awesome artwork of this book, get this book and then skip to the I think it's the penultimate chapter, um and and just read this the sequence that explains what the Keeper of Earth is.

[00:11:22]But, that's my review of Earthborn, which also should have been titled The Keeper of Earth or, in my opinion, book four. If they didn't have book five, book four should have been titled Keeper of Earth and tagging on to this, perfect. Perfect 10 out of 10 title if they had done that.

[00:11:38]But let me know your thoughts on Earthborn and the whole in the series as a whole in the comments section down below. And until next time, I'm Jonathan and thank you for watching.