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jenkepesh 's review for:
The Sparrow
by Mary Doria Russell
Have you ever read a book starting with a misunderstanding of what to expect, and found that your expectation coloured a lot of your experience of the book and that the revelation of your mistake made you reinterpret what you’d read? That is what happened to me when I read The Sparrow. I put it on my library hold list based on a recommendation from somewhere. Other books that I put on at around that time were from one of the summer reading lists published in The New York Times, at is where I thought I’d gotten the idea to read it. And all of those books are publications of the last few months. This book is set across the ti e span of 2019-2060, so it made sense that it was a recent publication, and I read it through with the understanding that it was published this summer. Only when I read an interview with the author at the end did I wonder about that, and then turned to the publication date, which was 1996. Wow! It wasn’t written starting in the present, but rather starting about 25 years in the future, and here we are now. That realization certainly changed my understanding of why Russell put certain kinds of emotional weight where she did, and why certain things that one would expect to show up in the story did not. It also showed that she managed to get her speculation about technology and economics and the crises of the world that were looming close enough to the mark that it did not ring false, just slightly different, as if she’d decided to construct an alternative recent history.
So now, understanding what the author’s actual knowledge was and also taking into account the social issues of 25 years ago and how they would shape the book, I am pondering it with double vision, remembering the late ‘90s and reading about a projected ti e which is now.
I know I am stingy with stars. I figure that almost anything I read is average, and that the steps above that are steep, though there’s a booster jilt in for particular authors, styles, and genres between three stars and four. But speculative fiction doesn’t get that booster. A four-star rating in this category means it really made me think, and that it was written well beyond a journeyman’s prose. The Sparrow is good enough that I will buy a copy to lend out, and may read it again, and will read the sequel.
So now, understanding what the author’s actual knowledge was and also taking into account the social issues of 25 years ago and how they would shape the book, I am pondering it with double vision, remembering the late ‘90s and reading about a projected ti e which is now.
I know I am stingy with stars. I figure that almost anything I read is average, and that the steps above that are steep, though there’s a booster jilt in for particular authors, styles, and genres between three stars and four. But speculative fiction doesn’t get that booster. A four-star rating in this category means it really made me think, and that it was written well beyond a journeyman’s prose. The Sparrow is good enough that I will buy a copy to lend out, and may read it again, and will read the sequel.