The Sparrow

I’m not a big science fiction reader as a rule, most of my shelf skews history and nonfiction, but Colby put this in my hands and told me to trust him, and I did, and it wrecked me in the specific way only a handful of books ever have. The structure alternates between the hopeful lead-up to a Jesuit mission to first contact and the broken aftermath, and you know from page one that something goes catastrophically wrong, the dread just accumulates the entire time.

It’s slow to start, I’ll be honest about that, the early chapters spend a lot of time establishing the linguistics team and their relationships before the mission even launches, and a few people I’ve talked to about this book almost put it down there. Don’t. Once the mission actually gets underway the momentum builds fast and by the second half I was reading it during lunch breaks at the warehouse instead of doing anything productive with that hour.

What sticks with me isn’t the plot mechanics, it’s Emilio’s faith, genuine and tested and ultimately shattered in a way the book doesn’t flinch from describing. This isn’t really a book about aliens. It’s a book about what happens to a person’s relationship with God when the universe answers back in a way nobody was prepared for, and it earns every bit of the devastation in its back half.

Five stars, and one of the only books I’ve had to sit with quietly for a day before I could talk about it with anyone. If you’ve been told it’s slow going in, push through the first hundred pages anyway. It’s worth every bit of the setup.