Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Villard
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780679456353ISBN:067945635X
Description: Good. Used item may show library stamps, stickers and marks. Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Fawcett Books
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780449004838ISBN:044900483X
Description: Good. This book is in good to very good condition. The binding is tight and pages are clean. There is a stamp on the inside of the front cover. The cover has bumps and scuffs. There is no creasing on the spine. It has been corner bumped. read more
Description: Very Good. 044900483X Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780449004838ISBN:044900483X
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Some edge and corner wear. Tanning pages. Tight binding. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 464 p. Ballantine Reader's Circle (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 1999-02-02
ISBN-13:9780449004838ISBN:044900483X
Description: Good. Clean unmarked pages. Mild edge wear. A very few folded corners. Creased cover corner tip. Fast Ship! 100% Guaranteed Purchase! read more
Description: Very Good. 044900483X Paperback, autographed by author, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Description: Very Good. 044900483X light shelf wear / edge wear cover / pages very good condition//"Buy with Confidence-Satisfaction Guaranteed! Customer Service Makes All the Difference. " read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780449004838ISBN:044900483X
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Slight edgewear. No markings or spine creasing. Pages bright and tight. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 464 p. Ballantine Reader's Circle (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Used; Good. Size: 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall; Author of acclaimed science fiction book "The Sparrow". In her second book. Father Emilio Sandhoz returns, and against his will is forced to continue his quest for the meaning of God's plan. read more
"This is twofer review, also including the first book "The Sparrow" as I pretty much consider them of a piece. Backcover-esque synopsis blurb: a Jesuit mission that's the First Contact between humanity and newly-discovered civilization right next door (relatively speaking, they're at Alpha Centauri) goes suddenly and horribly wrong.
Our hero's Emilio Sandoz, an agnostic Jesuit parish priest. Both books are written in a parallel structure in two different timeframes; the Sparrow runs parallel with the chronology of the small cast of characters who make up the first mission to Rakhat and how they came both to discover the radio signals and to the Society of Jesus-financed mission...decades later after he's been returned as that mission's apparently sole survivor, psychologically shattered, physically mutilated, a wreck of a man. The two threads converge to give a more complete picture of what happened and the course it took getting there, Sandoz's spiritual awakening and personal apocalypse both. It's a really thoughtful examination of the Problem of Evil, in an unpreachy non-denominational judeo-christian-framed way that doesn't stoop to easy answers. Some characters -try- to stoop to easy answers, but even they aren't convinced. There are reasons the "Problem of Pain" remains a problem.
Children of God picks up where The Sparrow leaves off; Emilio's shattered life starting to begin healing, but life's not done with him. Like its prequel, it's also structured in a parallel timeframe, with a bit more jumping around. It uses the structure better than the first book did--in The Sparrow it was mainly for dramatic effect, here, it uses the different timelines as a built-in and very appropriate way to examine a larger theme of how history is a wave that moves faster than the individuals in it (tangent: I think that phrase is yoinked from Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy, which I'm due a reread on sometime), here using relativistic time dilation effects of interstellar travel to make that even more literally the case. It covers the decades of time that passed on Rakhat after Sandoz was sent back, and the convulsive civil war that destroys and remakes the civilization there that was sparked by the mission's other survivor (omg spoiler!) and the characters the mission's lives touched, a war and revolution that's building inexorably to imminent species genocide of the once-ruling species there.
The larger themes examine the common narrative that everything has a purpose, and how if you accept that, there's the uncomfortable fact that if that's so, people are inevitably used in that purpose--and used hard, and cruelly. (A badly memory-mangled paraphrased quote from Aleister Crowley, I think--possibly some other early 20th century occult figure too, I ain't positive--kept coming to mind: "when a metallurgist seeks to purify an alloy of gold, he takes the base metal, heats it, hammers it flat, bathes it in acide, heats it again, hammers it again, over and over. He does not care about how the base feels about this process, only the result.")
There are definitely flaws--the author leans *way* too hard on the melodrama in several scenes, and you can just about hear generic tearjerker music swell at several points. I can sympathize with anyone who was tempted to stereotypically throw the book across the room when Sandoz and Mendes have a dramatic confontration at the second book's climax about the fate of the nearly-extinct Jana'ata *during a building thunderstorm and when it's resolved the storm passes* (I'd call that a seriously low point; I had no temptation to throw the book, though that was primarily because I was reading it on a kindle), but those flaws are overlookable for the quality of the whole."
"I almost can't believe how much I hated this book, especially since I enjoyed The Sparrow so much. I have a laundry list of things I didn't like, and here are the main points.
1. Too many scenes from the VaRahkati point of view. It seemed like Russell was more interested in writing a historical fiction piece about Rakhat rather than finishing up Emilio's story.
2. Going along with #1, there were far too many VaRahkati characters to keep track of. Many were introduced for only a short time, yet Russell forced the reader to slog through the history of each character even if they were completely unimportant to the story. Also, Russell switched between using the first, last, and full names of the characters for no apparent reason. I would get used to thinking of a character as their first name, then she would suddenly start using the last name.
3. I didn't like any of the other members of the crew. In the first novel, part of the reason I enjoyed it so much was because I really cared about the characters. Russell did a great job in that book establishing the relationships between the characters and making you care about them. Not so in this book. There were basically just cardboard cutouts that Russell stuck on the ship so that it could get to Rakhat.
4. Enough about God already. I know it's a Jesuit mission, but I felt like Russell just kept coming back to the same points and banging the reader over the head with them. Look, we get it, Emilio's forsaken God and people are worried (or claim to be worried) about his soul. Move on.
5. So you would think that the main action of the book would be when Emilio gets back to Rakhat. Ha! There is barely a chapter on that, and it is at the very end of the novel. This was possibly the most anticlimactic ending I've ever read.
*****SPOILERS*****
6. I hated the plot in this book. As if Emilio hasn't been through enough! He finally finds love and is about to marry. He has a chance at happiness and healing and a good life. Then Russell has him kidnapped so he can go back to Rakhat. For no other reason than for Russell to engage in a 300+ page look at the social impact of the Rakhat's civil war. Even the reunion with Sofia Mendes, which could have been a bright spot in the novel, was a complete letdown. I would have been much happier with this novel had it been about Emilio's journey back from the brink of despair, but instead it left me feeling more depressed than the first one did."
"I started reading this book back in 2004, right after I finished The Sparrow. When Emilio ended up on that ship headed back to space, I quit reading. Hasn't he been through enough already? I wanted him to marry Gina and have a nice life. Poor guy! I didn't want to go back to Rakhat myself and I didn't blame him for not wanting to go either.
4 1/2 years later, I picked the book up again and this time I read it all the way through. I love Mary Doria Russell and just hosted her at our library for a One Book, One Community event featuring A Thread of Grace. I knew I owed it to her and to myself to finish Children of God.
You've got to love the first paragraph of this novel,"Celestina Guiliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism. That is what she remembered about the party, mostly, aside from the man who cried."
From there, Russell spins a tale woven of misunderstandings and conflict. She does an excellent job of explaining what went wrong on the Jesuit mission in The Sparrow. But she doesn't hand it over to us all wrapped up with a bow. She makes us work for it, there are no easy answers. But in the end, we find redemption and reconciliation.
The bottom line of this book is that "every soul is a small reflection of God, and that it is wicked to murder because when a life is taken, we lose that unique revelation of God's nature," p. 413. This is as true for the Jana'ata and Runa as it is for Israelis and Palestinians, Bosnians and Serbs, Tutsis and Hutus.
Was the Jesuit mission really ordained by God? Did God have a reason for bringing these people to Rakhat? See p. 427.
" . . . we are all--Jana'ata and Runa and H'uman--children of a God so high that our ranks and our differences are as nothing in his far sight" p. 358.
See also pp. 146, description of joy--p. 237, "The great appeal of Jesus is the willingness of God to walk among the benighted creatures He just can't seem to give up on. There is a glorious looniness to it--the magnificent eternal gesture of salvation, in the face of perennial, thickheaded human inanity! I like that in a deity" p. 264. "What if Moses had been an Egyptian, raised among the Hebrews?" p. 379 Sandoz cries p. 401 "If I can find you ten (innocents), will you spare the others for their sake?" p. 412-413"
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