I liked the book (which I read being young teen) exactly because it was a tale of organized child abuse (that's how I saw any armed forces btw), hero worship and genocide, with a "hero" who doesn't know what he's doing. I didn't see the redemption though. Maybe is's beaceause I read "Speaker for the dead" soon after. Although as I recall it was clearly said that Peter won't let Ender come back to earth at least not to be anything else than his puppet.

Of course as a teen I very much liked startegy, tactics, battles and kind of lord of the flies social dynamics that rang a bell with my earlier childhood memories.

I guess that this books somehow shaped my view of the world as I usually think that survival is the most impotant thing but that there's no glory or moral high ground to it and the fact you survived or saved someone doesn't absolve you in any way from what you did to achieve that.