The Sparrow (The Sparrow, #1) in Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library

Jun 22, 2008 Jamie Collins rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi-aliens, science-fiction

I liked this, but it's terribly sad, and requires a herculean suspension of disbelief. It's a good novel, but not good science fiction.

I was prepared for Jesuits in Space but not the abrupt and highly unlikely way the mission is planned and carried out. The chapter where the protagonists make the precipitate decision to go visit the aliens threw me right out of the narrative, and it took several chapters for me to forgive the author and become reabsorbed in the novel. And later in the mission it ...more

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Feb 22, 2009 Amy rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

I can't say I really enjoyed this book. One, it is about a Jesuit priest and faith. Important and thought-inspiring topics, and extremely well-written, but not really a good fit for my frame of mind this year. Two, I knew from the very beginning of the book that only one person survived...that kind of made it hard for me to invest emotionally in the other characters, knowing that somehow they would not survive the trip.

But somehow, I cared anyway. And so of course I let myself in for a load of g ...more

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May 04, 2019 Lorena rated it it was ok

Shelves: science-fiction, epl

The writing style was engaging and interesting, for the most part, but that's about all I can say for this book. For a bunch of supposedly genius-level people, the characters displayed such breath-taking stupidity that it was hard to sympathize with them much (especially when the stupidity seemed to take place mostly in order to advance the plot to its desired conclusion, and didn't seem believable based on everything else we knew about the characters). Between the characters' convenient blindne ...more

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