Children of God is the follow-up to Russell's The Sparrow, one of my favorite books of last year and all time. It picks up shortly after the last book left off, with Emilio Sandoz still recovering from what he believes God did to him and trying to reconcile that with his life on Earth, where forty years passed by while he was gone.
The Society of Jesuits is set on sending a second mission to Rakhat to try again, as it were, and attempt to open up trade agreements with the Jana'ata that will be mutually beneficial. The Father General wants Emilio to return to the planet, but Emilio, understandably, is only willing to train people to go in his stead. The Father General, ever wily, figures out some way to get Emilio on that ship.
Meanwhile, back on Rakhat, we find out that Emilio wasn't the last human left on the planet after all, and also that that human seems to have helped engineer a Runa revolution, changing Runa and Juna'ata society for the better, but also for the worse.
The book is told in the back-and-forth style of The Sparrow, but I don't think it worked as well as in the first novel. It felt a little too jarring to keep zooming between the planets and their timeframes that didn't line up, and then also to go back and forth between the on-planet present and the on-planet future looking back. But it was still a good book, probably more so if you've read the first one.
Rating: 8/10
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Showing posts with label cleveland writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cleveland writers. Show all posts
15 September 2008
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell (9 September − 13 September)
Read this book. Seriously.
The Sparrow mostly follows the story of Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest who, through coincidences (or God's work?) ends up on a mission to a just-discovered planet near Alpha Centauri. The book follows two timelines, one starting when Sandoz returns to Earth, as the last surviving member of the crew, several years after some very embarrassing and horrifying information about Sandoz has made its own way back. He is to report on the mission to his superiors, but has to get over what happened to him before he can face the other priests.
The other timeline starts back at the beginning, with the events leading up to the discovery of the planet, then details the mission and what happens after the crew lands on Rakhat. This second timeline slowly fills in the large number of blanks left in the first, and helps make Sandoz's alleged crimes understandable.
I don't want to be too specific here, because a lot of what I loved about the book was the way Russell would bring in a fact without explanation, causing me to say, "What? When did that happen? Why?" and then a little while later the narrative would answer my question.
I loved this book a whole ridiculous bunch. It's an interesting take on what would happen if we found life on another planet and went out to meet it, and if meeting that life would go just how we might expect it. I'm a big fan of the dual timeline, and Russell uses this to her great advantage.
The one thing I didn't like terribly much is that the ending happens so fast − you spend a lot of time leisurely following the stories and then all of a sudden Russell is throwing in forced exposition in order to tie up the story. I would gladly have read another hundred pages (the book is about 400); the rushed ending was unnecessary and made the religious tie-ins at the end seem a bit trite.
Rating: 9.5/10
The Sparrow mostly follows the story of Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest who, through coincidences (or God's work?) ends up on a mission to a just-discovered planet near Alpha Centauri. The book follows two timelines, one starting when Sandoz returns to Earth, as the last surviving member of the crew, several years after some very embarrassing and horrifying information about Sandoz has made its own way back. He is to report on the mission to his superiors, but has to get over what happened to him before he can face the other priests.
The other timeline starts back at the beginning, with the events leading up to the discovery of the planet, then details the mission and what happens after the crew lands on Rakhat. This second timeline slowly fills in the large number of blanks left in the first, and helps make Sandoz's alleged crimes understandable.
I don't want to be too specific here, because a lot of what I loved about the book was the way Russell would bring in a fact without explanation, causing me to say, "What? When did that happen? Why?" and then a little while later the narrative would answer my question.
I loved this book a whole ridiculous bunch. It's an interesting take on what would happen if we found life on another planet and went out to meet it, and if meeting that life would go just how we might expect it. I'm a big fan of the dual timeline, and Russell uses this to her great advantage.
The one thing I didn't like terribly much is that the ending happens so fast − you spend a lot of time leisurely following the stories and then all of a sudden Russell is throwing in forced exposition in order to tie up the story. I would gladly have read another hundred pages (the book is about 400); the rushed ending was unnecessary and made the religious tie-ins at the end seem a bit trite.
Rating: 9.5/10
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