A Thread of Grace
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Busy, noisy and heartfelt, this sprawling novel by Russell—a
striking departure from her previous two acclaimed SF thrillers, The Sparrow
and Children of God—chronicles the Italian resistance to the Germans during
the last two years of WWII. Three cultures mingle uneasily in Porto
Sant'Andrea on the Ligurian coast of northwest Italy—the Italian Jews of the
village, headed by the chief rabbi Iacopo Soncini; the Italian Catholics,
like Sant'Andrea's priest Don Osvaldo Tomitz, who befriend and shelter the
Jews; and the occupying Germans invited by Mussolini's crumbling regime. In
the last camp is the drunken, tubercular Nazi deserter, Doktor Schramm, a
broken man who confesses to Don Osvaldo that while working in state
hospitals and Auschwitz, he was responsible for murdering 91,867 people.
Meanwhile, Jewish refugees in southern France, including Albert Blum and his
teenage daughter, Claudette, are fleeing across the Alps to Italy, hoping to
find sanctuary there. Russell pursues numerous narrative threads, including
the Blums' perilous flight over the mountains; Italian Jew Renzo Leoni's
personal coming to terms with his participation in the Dolo hospital bombing
during the Abyssinian campaign in 1935; the dangerous frenzy of the Italian
partisans; and the bloody-mindedness of German officers resolved to carry
out Hitler's murderous racial policy despite mounting evidence of its
futility. The action moves swiftly, with impressive authority, jostling
dialogue, vibrant personalities and meticulous, unexpected historical
detail. The intensity and intimacy of Russell's storytelling, her sharp
character writing and fierce sense of humor bring fresh immediacy to this
riveting WWII saga.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Italian citizens saved more than 43,000 Jews during the last 20 months
of World War II. Russell has transmuted this little-known history into an
expansive, well-researched, and compelling novel. As the story opens, the
mountainous region of northwest Italy has been relatively untouched by WWII,
and even Jews have been safe. When Italy breaks with Germany in 1943 and
pulls out of southern France, thousands of Jewish refugees cross the
mountains in search of safety. But the German occupation of Italy poses a
new threat. Even with the list that's provided, it can be hard to keep track
of all the characters--Catholics and Jews, priests and rabbis, Germans and
Italians, old and young, Nazis and Resistance fighters. But Russell is good
at presenting the human story while never using the war merely as a backdrop
for personal dramas. In fact, to mirror the arbitrary nature of survival
during wartime, she has said that she flipped a coin to determine who among
her characters would live and who would die.
--
Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
PRAISE FOR
Children of God
Amazon.com's Science Fiction and Fantasy
Editor's Recommended Book:
Children of God is the sequel to Mary Doria Russell's 1996 The Sparrow,
which saw a Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat end in disaster. The sole survivor of that
mission, a priest named Emilio Sandoz, returned a beaten and broken man, having suffered
rape and mutilation at the hands of enigmatic aliens. Now the Jesuits want to go back to
Rakhat, and they want Sandoz aboard the new mission. But Sandoz has renounced his
priesthood and even found a measure of happiness with his new wife and stepdaughter.
Meanwhile, on Rakhat, contact with the humans has thrown the local culture into turmoil,
precipitating a war between Rakhat's two sentient races. As forces conspire to send Emilio
back to Rakhat--and toward a possible reconciliation with God--the planet verges on
genocidal destruction. Children of God is a more polished novel than The Sparrow,
and the story is equally compelling.
The New York Times Book Review, Jim
Gladstone
Russell succeeds in painting an alien culture with remarkably detailed verisimilitude.
Entertainment Weekly, Tom De Haven
...a tragic, haunting parable about moral justice that miraculously avoids all of the
usual clichés and even subverts some of them. Here, for a change, is a sequel that
counts.
Publishers Weekly
As in her first book, Russell uses the entertaining plot to explore sociological,
spiritual, religious, scientific and historical questions.... It is, however, the complex
figure of Father Sandoz around which a diverse interplanetary cast orbits, and it is the
intelligent, emotional and very personal feud between Father Sandoz and his God that
provides energy for these books.
PRAISE FOR
The Sparrow
From Infinity
Plus
There are books born to win prizes and this is one of them.
Amazon.com's Science Fiction and Fantasy
Editor's Recommended Book
In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post
in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as
Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission,
the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own.
What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to
question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition,
Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong... Words
like "provocative" and "compelling" will come to mind as you read this
shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and
prayer.
The New York Times Book Review, Colleen
McCullough
The novel belongs to the shattered figure of Emilio Sandoz ... The Sparrow is a
startling, engrossing and moral work of fiction.
From Booklist , September 1, 1996
When readers meet Father Emilio Sandoz, he's a wreck, inside and out. His hands are
maimed, his body bruised; he suffers from scurvy, anemia, and spiritual devastation. The
year is 2059. Although Jesuit missionaries thrive on suffering, something particularly
dire has happened to this skilled linguist. Four decades earlier, he proposed an
expedition to discover the sentient beings whose strange yet beautiful music had been
detected by radio telescope. As the only survivor of this spiritual odyssey to Alpha
Centauri (the star system four light years from Earth), Sandoz was found dazed and filled
with terror by rescuers who inferred that he had resorted to prostitution to stay alive.
Returned to the Jesuit Order, Sandoz is forced to face truths about the godless alien
societies on the planet Rakhat that he and his colleagues grew to know, love, and perish
at the claws of. Miscommunications, misplaced trust, and tiny mistakes led to their
downfall. The dense prose in this complex tale may at first seem off-putting, but hang on
for the ride; it's riveting! Russell's first novel is also a Book-of-the-Month Club
selection. Jennifer Henderson
Copyright© 1996, American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews , August 1, 1996
Brilliant first novel about the discovery of extraterrestrial life and the voyage of a
party of Jesuit missionaries to Alpha Centauri. Russell lays down two narratives: One
begins in 2059, in the aftermath of the mission; the other in 2019, when a young
astronomer intercepts a transmission of haunting songs from Alpha Centauri. In the latter,
a linguist and Jesuit priest named Emilio Sandoz swiftly organizes a group of Jesuits and
civilian specialists to turn an asteroid into a spaceship. The ship will reach the singing
planet, called Rakhat, in four years of passenger time, even though 17 years will pass on
Earth. In the narrative beginning in 2059, therefore, the mission's only survivor, Sandoz
himself, is only a decade older. But he is a broken man physically and spiritually. The
mission began well: Rakhat was beautiful and bountiful, and the men and women from Earth
lived peacefully alongside a gentle and dreamy race, rather like the eloi of H.G. Wells's
The Time Machine, here called the runa. Then, inadvertently, the visitors improve the
local diet, causing a surge in births among the Runa; suddenly, another, fiercer race
appears to put things right. It seems that the Jana'ata raise the Runa like rabbits. The
newborn are slain and eaten, as is the party from Earth, except for Sandoz, who is taken
to the strange capitol city and sold into a brothel. There, he is raped repeatedly by the
great poet who wrote the angelic songs that fetched the Jesuits in the first place. A
startling portrait of an alien culture and of the nature of God as well, since, in his
utter humiliation and in the annihilation of his spirit, Sandoz is reborn in faith. Shades
of Wells, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Arthur C. Clarke, with just a dash of Edgar Rice
Burroughs--and yet strikingly original, even so. (Book- of-the-Month Club/Quality
Paperback Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved.
From the Publisher
J. Rendon, Editorial Assistant
"This is one of my favorite books of all time, EVER!!!! And I'm not just saying
that because I work here at Ballantine/Fawcett and I have to. Being in the editorial
department, there are always way too many books to read and way too little time to do it
in. That's why when I first overheard one of my colleagues raving about this book to
someone, I didn't give it a second thought. While it's nice to know at least a little
something about the current books on our list (no small feat), this book had never caught
my eye as something I'd be interested in. But after the millionth time I'd heard my cohort
extolling the virtues of this book to anyone who would listen, I figured I would give it a
shot.
I started reading it on my vacation, and it's a good thing, because I couldn't put it down to do anything else! I'm not quite sure what I can say about it that will do it justice, because it can be viewed so many different ways by different people----it's beautiful, ugly, sad, optimistic, and intensely compelling all at the same time. Suffice it to say that it's one of those once-in-a-lifetime books that just makes you stop and sit-up and think about things that you've never given second thought to before."
Science Fiction Weekly
"Russell's debut novel...focuses on her characters, and it is here that
the work truly shines. An entertaining infusion of humor keeps the book from becoming too
dark, although some of the characters are so clever that they sometimes seem contrived.
Readers who dislike an emphasis on moral dilemmas or spiritual quests may be turned off,
but those who enjoy science fiction because it can create these things are in for a real
treat."
San Francisco Chronicle
"The Sparrow tackles a difficult subject with grace and intelligence."
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"The Sparrow is an incredible novel, for one reason. Though it is set in the
early twenty-first century, it is not written like most science fiction. Russell's novel
is driven by her characters, by their complex relationships and inner conflicts, not by
aliens or technology."
San Antonio Express News
"It is rare to find a book about interplanetary exploration that has this
much insight into human nature and foresight into a possible future."
The Seattle Times
"Two narratives--the mission to the planet and its aftermath four decades
later--interweave to create a suspenseful tale."
Entertainment Weekly
"By alternating chapters that dramatize Sandoz's tough-love interrogation with
flashbacks to the mission's genesis, flowering, and tragic collapse, The Sparrow casts a
strange, unsettling emotional spell, bouncing readers from scenes of black despair to ones
of wild euphoria, from the bracing simplicity of pure adventure to the complicated tangles
of nonhuman culture and politics.--The smooth storytelling and gorgeous characterization
can't be faulted."
Midwest Book Review
The Sparrow is the story of a charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz,
who leads a twenty-first century scientific mission to a newly discovered extraterrestrial
culture. Sandoz and his companions are prepared to endure isolation, hardship and death,
but nothing can prepare them for the civilization they encounter, or for the tragic
misunderstanding that brings the mission to a catastrophic end. Once considered a living
saint, Sandoz returns alone to Earth physically and spiritually maimed, the mission's sole
survivor, only to be accused of heinous crimes and blamed for the mission's failure. In
clean, effortless prose and with captivating flashes of wit, Mary Russell creates
memorable characters who navigate the world of exciting ideas and disturbing moral issues
without ever losing their humanity or humor. The Sparrow is immediately engaging and very
memorable reading!
