Rating: 3/5
What It’s About:
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.
Or does he?
Goodreads
The Review
Project Hail Mary is somewhat out of my normal reading genres but I’ve been wanting to branch out more. Since this book got so many good reviews, I thought maybe it would be a good book to take a chance on. It turns out that I got lucky! I really enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Warning: This review may contain some minor spoilers.
What I liked
The overall plot of the story was engaging and I could imagine it being a great movie as well. I’ve seen a few things online saying that a movie is being developed with Ryan Gosling as the main character, Ryland Grace. This book has space travel, relativity, planets in other universes, and extraterrestrial life. It kind of reminded me of the movie Interstellar. I liked how this book explored the idea of aliens but in a unique way that I’ve never come across before.
*Spoiler ahead*
Grace’s character was interesting and I liked that the reader doesn’t really know much about him in the beginning because of memory loss after waking from his space travel coma. More about his background and experiences are revealed as the story progresses and the pieces of the situation start to fit together. Then Grace meets Rocky, the highly intelligent alien, whose own home planet is suffering from the same problem as Earth. Both Grace and Rocky are the last survivors on their respective ships and they are now the only ones that can save their civilizations.
You guys, I never in my life expected to fall in love with an alien rock spider. The relationship between Grace and Rocky was my absolute favorite part of Project Hail Mary. They learned to communicate with each other, talked about their biology, civilizations, and scientific knowledge. It was really cool to say the least lol. Both characters were very different but still found a way to work together to try and complete their mission. The humor was another selling point for me. I found myself laughing often at their antics. But it wasn’t all fun and games though. The pair go through some very low points as well.
What I didn’t like
The amount of science in Project Hail Mary was difficult for me. For awhile I tried to comprehend everything but then I started to get tired. I was thankful that Weir always managed to simplify each big science segment into key points. Science has never really been my thing, which is why I don’t read sci-fi that often. Fortunately, this book was accessible enough for me to make it through.
Final Thoughts
This is the second book that I’ve read by Andy Weir. I remember reading Artemis and not really connecting with it. I have also seen film adaptation of The Martian and really enjoyed it. Despite my struggle with the sci-fi element of this book, I know that Grace and Rocky’s friendship will be one of my favorites of all time.