There's no easy way to sum up how I felt—how I still feel—about this book. It's both fascinating and incredibly traumatizing. The basic story is this: "Singing is heard coming from a planet in Alpha Centauri. A Jesuit mission is sent there. It all goes horribly, horribly wrong." I could actually tell you more—specific details, even—and it still wouldn't spoil it, because the story is really in the wonderfully crafted characters and in the way the whole thing unfolds, with the timeline of the mission interspersed with its aftermath and the return to Earth of the sole survivor. (For the record, I haven't given away anything that you don't learn in about the first ten pages.) There is amazing amount of stuff going on in this book—anthropological and linguistic investigations, as well as an investigation of faith. Russell makes it all fascinating; where I had problems was a little in the pacing—things unravel with a startling suddenness that may be realistic, but makes the book seem somewhat unbalanced—and more so in trying to discern what Russell intended the readers' overall conclusions to be. After all the horrible things that happen to Emilio, are we supposed to feel some transcendent moment, some renewal of faith or hope? It just wasn't there for me, and I can't tell if that's me or the book.