Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit Priest, is a master linguist who has been ordered by his superiors from place to place, learning languages and helping the poor and unfortunate for the glory of God. When he is allowed to return to his home town in Arecibo Puerto Rico he befriends a Anne Rice, a physician; her engineer husband, George; a young astronomer, Jimmy Quinn; and a former child prostitute turned computer expert, Sofia Mendez. On August 3rd, 2019 a radio transmission is picked up at Arecibo Puerto Rico from intelligent life on another planet. Jimmy Quinn is the first to hear it, and, against protocol, Jimmy's closets friends, including Sandoz, are next.

From the instant Sandoz hears the people of Rakhat singing from 4 light-years away he is convinced in the need to meet them for the glory of his God. He and his Jesuit order stop at nothing to put together the first mission to the planet and the crew includes himself, three other Jesuits, and his skilled friends from Arecibo.

Despite initial success, the mission goes horribly wrong. When a government led mission arrive several years later they find Sandoz with brutally mangled hands, living as a prostitute, and standing over the body of an alien child he had just murdered. Sandoz returns to earth, disgraced, and it is up to his Jesuit superiors to try and find out what happened.

The book is written from the point of view of two different time periods, alternating from chapter to chapter. One follows Sandoz as a broken man being questioned about the mission, and the other shows how the mission unfolded and what really happened. This approach to telling the story works perfectly for the plot and everything from chapter to chapter is masterfully paced.

The reader is immediately hooked by the question of what made Sandoz go from a devoted priest that believes his God is lovingly guiding his life to a man who is physically broken and has come to hate God. As the details of the mission are revealed the answer to that question may shock the reader.

This is all around a beautiful book and among the books that I've read in the last year this is one of my favorite. However, to be honest, despite how much I liked it, there are a number of flaws throughout the book that I think potential readers should be made aware of. These problems include a few spots were the writing becomes unclear, some technical problems in the plot, and that her characters' dialogue can sometimes be a bit annoying. I'll explain below.

There are a few spots here and there that aren't written as well as the rest of the book and you'll have to re-read to figure out what just happened. There are only a few of these instances that I noticed, and they only last a paragraph or two, but at least one of them came at an important point in the plot. However, the book is good enough that even really picky readers will probably forgive these bad spells and gladly keep going.

There are also technology related problems in the plot that will annoy scientists or people with technical training. For example, Sophia Mendez is supposed to be some fabulously expert computer programmer called a "vulture". "Vultures" supposedly can write computer programs so well that they can replace people at their jobs, and people tend to get nervous whenever a Vulture is hired to study what they do. However, I've done some computer programming in my time, and there is absolutely nothing that Sofia does that regular old hackers like myself couldn't do. It is particularly annoying that Sophia gets called in to write a program that can do Jimmy Quinn's job. As a physics graduate student myself, I can tell you that Jimmy would have written that program himself a long, long time ago without Sofia's help. As far as other technical issues are concerned, I think she handles the Special Relativity well enough in the story, but there are other ideas she puts forth that I don't think are actually physically possible, such as a planet with an atmosphere but no ionosphere ( see note below *). But, then again, I guess this is science fiction, and in comparison to a Star Trek or a Star Wars novel the science in here is solid.

Sometimes the Character's dialogue, though I think it is realistic, can get a little annoying. Russell has gone out of her way to try and give her characters interesting backgrounds, accents and dialects. She succeeds. However, reading a passage with a realistic portrayal of a Texan spouting folksy sayings is just as a bad as sitting on a bus next to a real Texan spouting folksy sayings. You may want to strangle them before you get to your stop, and in the book you might want to pop a cork in the character D.W. (a Texan who often spouts folksy sayings). Also everyone in the group is often joking around with one another. Though it can sometimes help to build the characters and set the mood, other times it just reads like a transcript of a conversation from a dinner party you weren't invited to (a little annoying, why wasn't I invited!).

Despite the flaws I just mentioned, this is still a very good book. As Russell revealed more and more about Father Sandoz and what happened to him I really couldn't put it down. I read the last hundred or so pages in one day, and added the sequel "Children of God" to my list of books to eventually read (I'll do a review when I get around to reading it).

*The ionosphere of a planet is a layer of charged ions around the outside of the atmosphere. On earth we use the ionosphere to help bounce radio signals across the planet. Supposedly Rakhat has no ionosphere so they use their moon to bounce radio signals. However, the ionosphere is created by particles from the sun (low energy cosmic rays) colliding with the atmosphere, and I don't see how a planet like Rakhat with an atmosphere and two suns could not have an ionosphere (this is different from an ozone layer). If you have an idea for how Russell's scenario could be possible, let me know.