"Jesuits in space" is how the author describes it

This post was supposed to be a review of Mary Doria Russell's Children of God. But I thought, if people read that book title, they probably won't click the article because it sounds like a religion book. And it's not. But I suppose it is religious in a speculative sort of way. It's also science fiction, and that, too, would turn a lot of people away, people like my mother. So I'll tell you what I told my mother.

Children of God is a sequel to The Sparrow. Although Amazon.com says otherwise, you really do need to read the first book to appreciate the second.

Sparrow goes back and forth. It begins with with an incompacitated Jesuit priest, Emilio Sandoz, a destroyed man, who has just returned to earth after a Jesuit-sponsored exploration of a faraway planet inhabited by two different civilizations, two species, one which lives off the other. We see how he deals with life after his return to Italy, how he interacts with bishops and priests and a brother (not the biological kind) you will love. And we see how they react to him.

But Sparrow is also flashbacks of the explorers' preparation for the trip to the planet and their lives once there. So we understand why certain people went and what happened to them and, particularly, Father Sandoz once there.

I much preferred reading about Father Sandoz's life back with the Italian clergymen, but others preferred the flashbacks. I had to convince my mother that the conversations among the men back in Italy make the whole book worth reading.

The sequel, Children of God, begins with a physically repaired, though handicapped, Father Sandoz who is so bitter about a God who would let what happened happen that he left the priesthood. He soon plans to marry a woman but ends up back on a spaceship headed for that faraway planet. It was a little hard for me to swallow; the author sure had to do some manipulation here.  But Sandoz returns to some really big changes in politics and civilizations.

This book goes not only back and forth but back and forth and forth and forth and back. Honestly, though, Russell was careful not to be confusing, and I didn't have a hard time as long as I checked the year at the beginning of a chapter. Publishers Weekly called the plot entertaining, but I guess I took it too seriously; it was more nerve wracking (in a good way) than entertaining to me.

Read both books. They're probably different from other books you've read. Russell doesn't just relate science fiction; at the same time, she explores sociological, spiritual, religious, scientific, and historical questions, as Publishers Weekly says.

Russell, I believe, used to be Catholic, herself, and is now Jewish. In my experience, when someone leaves the Catholic Church, they're angry and/or disgusted with the Church. So I was very pleased with her treatment of both religions.

I don't know if I convinced my mother. I loaned her my copy of Sparrow. It's still on her hallway table. But she bought Children of God, so there's hope.