In brief: Earth receives a signal from an alien civilization. The Jesuits (yes, those Jesuits) mount an expedition to go meet the aliens, but disaster befalls it.

Let me start with the good: the alien languages were intriguing. In one of them, one says “Someone” instead of “I”. E.g., “Someone is glad to see you” means “I am glad to see you”. This is a bit reminiscent of the way, in French, “on” (one, an indefinite person or persons) means “we”. There’s a question of declension in the book that hinges on what seems to me a fairly plausible sort of distinction a mind in another culture might make.

The alien species were interesting. I suspect that a biologist would poke all sorts of holes in Russell's descriptions, but I thought they were interesting, at least in a “Huh. I wonder if that would work” sort of way.

And of course it was interesting to see how adding religion to the mix would change things. This one goes both ways, though: on one hand, you don’t see religion a lot in science fiction, and when you do, it’s often an alien religion with a hard kernel of truth in the middle of it. If you’re expecting God to show up in The Sparrow, you’re going to be disappointed. You have people who believe in the Catholic god, and people who go through all sorts of emotions and personal development based on their belief that the Catholic god exists, but God quite pointedly stays out. This becomes significant near the end.

If you, the reader, are Catholic, that’s one thing. But for those of us on the outside, a lot of the problems seem self-inflicted. The simplest example is that of the priests, who suffer from not having a normal sex life, something they freely chose. At one point, one character has a revelation: that rape is worse than prostitution, because prostitution is consensual. Why yes, thank you. Welcome to Ethics 101. But apparently the Catholic church, obsessed as it is with sex, sees the sex act as the major determinant in whether something is sinful, eclipsing the consent part.
And speaking of which, there are some bits involving Catholic church officials dealing with sex abuse that take on a new tenor, thanks to what we now know about its practice of shielding rapists.

Moving on: the expedition itself seems more like something out of a kids’ adventure novel than, say, [b:The Martian|18007564|The Martian|Andy Weir|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1413706054s/18007564.jpg|21825181]: Spoilerit looks as though less planning has gone into an interstellar, first-contact expedition than into the Oregon Trail: they don’t even seem to have brought walkie-talkies! And the people on the trip are very definitely not astronauts.

All in all, not at all a bad story, but there are some major problems.