jassmine 's review for:

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
3.0
My feelings on this book are milder than I would have expected.
1. Loved the premise. I like to see a sci-fi that doesn't shy away from religious questions. There is a lot of religious discussions that I thought interesting, but at the same time religion didn't really play any part in the "plot" in the end...
2. The dark side of that is that this is framed as another missionary journey (which in the end, it really is not... so... what was the point?) compared to the missions to Mohawks, which honestly... I thought these were the faults we don't want to repeat?
3. The beginning is extremely slow and at first it was difficult for me to orient myself in the characters (I was listening to audio though). On one side, it felt really sophisticated when all of the people came together, on the other it was just too long. I quite enjoyed the slow pace, but I feel like some good editing might do this book good.
4. The other side of that was the ending that felt quite abrupt, spiting me out without a chance to process what have been said. The whole book felt very unproportionate which was only made worse by the narrative framing.
5. The characters were very enjoyable and alive. I especially fell for Sophia, but they were all quite lovely. That said, they felt like a bunch of children on an excursion, like... how can anyone be surprised that things went badly?
6. Looking back at some of the quotations, spiritually this book is quite strong. Unnerving, but it gets a bit lost in all of the "redundant" pieces and falls short with the abrupt ending. .... It's actually quite a nice book about theodicy, I wish I knew that sooner - if I wasn't so focused on the plot, I might appreciated this book more (again I think the format didn't served this well...)
Overall, this is quite a good book, but I guess it should be read as entertaining theological/philosophical treatise more than a sci-fi novel... I quite enjoyed it, but it didn't truly connect with me.

Edit: I'm still thinking about it, some pure spoilery wonderings...
Spoiler I just... I get that the whole image of "I fall in love with God and he raped me" is quite beautiful in its controversy, but... it also feels a bit hypocritical and privileged. Just follow my train of thoughts... It's the rape that Emilio describes as the moment when he lost faith. And I get that, it's one of the worst violations of the body that can happen to you, I absolutely don't want to diminish that. But... Emilio is a "social worker" (for lack of a better term), he works with people that are in terrible economical, social and psychological situations. He knows that people get raped, he surely knows women that were raped, he knows this is the reality. If God is good, why so many women are raped? Why is it that only when it happens to him, he looses his faith? Do you get my point? While I'm not saying that his - repeated - rape is something to take lightly, I feel like the lowest point of the book is when he accidentally kills Azkama that is the true tragedy of the story and I feel like this point could have been stressed a bit more, but... whatever.