REALLY Awesome Book: "The Sparrow"

[Lopez]

I have read this book faster than I have read any other book. 400 pages in 12 hours, from 3 PM to 3 AM. This is a really sweet book. It is called "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell.

It involves the first contact between civilizations, as humanity discovers the planet Rakhat. However, they rapidly lost contact with the original explorers, and a search party finds only one survivor from the original team. No one really knows the full story except Sandoz, the survivor, himself. But he has been scarred, both physically, and mentally, and refuses to talk.

The official story involves something like prostitution. And killing a little girl. Both true events, as witnessed by his rescuers.

The closest I can get to describing the alien race is through a link to another comic.

http://www.messenger-comic.com/

Kind of the like the creatures there, is about the best I could do to describe them.

Now, here's where things get freaky.

Sandoz? The survivor?

He's a Jesuit.

The guy who turned to prostitution and killed a little girl.

That's right, he's part of the order of Catholic priests that educated me. Apparently they're still around in 2060.

Many of you do not quite understand the Jesuits, believing "oh, they're another religious order all into that hocus-pocus magic stuff." Thank goodness, they aren't. They're more real. Sheesh, no other priest could get away with this...

Obedience was one thing, Being used, even by the Father General, was another. He was offended but also embarrassed that he had taken so long to wise up...considering things, John was also sort of flattered; after all, he'd been brought all the way from Chicago because his Jesuit superiors knew he was almost genetically programmed to despise a**holes like his beloved brother in Christ, Johannes Voelker.

So, the first crew to visit a foreign civilization contained four Jesuits, one Catholic, one lapsed Catholic, one atheist, and one Jew. Everything seems to go well, even though we've been told the end of the story at the beginning.

What went wrong? What changed everything?

This book definitely deserves a read if you are interested in any of the following topics: Religion, celibacy, first contact, alien cultures and societies, and linguistics. Even if those things don't interest you at the current, I guarantee you'll be hooked. In short, this is the book I'VE been wanting to write all these years.