The Sparrow

Content Ratings

Moderate Romance

Several crew members are in loving, committed partnerships; relationships are warm and emotionally important; the novel does not depict explicit sexual content in these relationships.

Intense Themes

The novel is a sustained meditation on the failure of good intentions, the impossibility of true cross-cultural understanding, the crisis of faith caused by witnessing innocents suffer, and the psychological devastation of sexual violation and helplessness.

High Violence

The novel's central tragedy involves the sexual assault and castration of the Jesuit protagonist by an alien he misunderstood; the revelation is rendered with full emotional force though not in gratuitous physical detail.

Synopsis

When signals of alien music are detected from the nearby star Alpha Centauri, a Jesuit-sponsored expedition becomes the first to reach the source, and the novel alternates between the mission's joyful early days and the return of its sole survivorâ€”broken, disfigured, and accused of crimesâ€”as the horrific truth of what happened on the alien world slowly emerges. A profound and devastating novel about faith, good intentions, and catastrophic cultural misunderstanding. Not for the faint of heart.