Summary: A very special boy can see the paths of everything that has ever lived. And he is not just any boy. But he does not know that yet.
Orson Scott Card is both blessed and cursed with being able to write books about very gifted children better than anyone I know. It is a blessing because with few exceptions his books are very good.
The negative is that his stories are reminiscent of each other, even when they have different settings and genres. Pathfinder is more fantasy (at least in the first book) than science fiction or dystopian. There are two storylines that do not quite merge in this book. I assume that we will learn more in future books.
What I think is happening is that a colony ship from Earth (the first one) had something unexpected happen when they tried to move through a fold in space. Instead of jumping something odd happened. We really do not know for sure what happened through most of the book.