So, I was eating the other day (Week? Month? Jesus! I need to write these reviews sooner after I finish a book) and my wife put down her utensils and looked at me, worried. 
 "What's wrong?" She said. 
 I hadn't been eating apparently, just staring off into the middle distance. "I'm haunted." 
 She cocked her head to the side, kind of the way my dog will if I ask it why it keeps shitting on my shoes. 
 "I.... I think it's this book I just finished. It has disturbed me." 
 And that is probably the most truthful snippet of dialog I think I've ever written about myself (I used to put all sorts of dialogs into essays, blog posts, reviews - most of them were comedic recaps of real conversations with funnier dialog or more hyperbolic moments of emphasis). 
 But the above was, best I can recall, verbatim. And it captures my feeling upon finishing this. I was haunted. The book was disturbing in all the ways that I find, well, disturbing. 
 In fact, I didn't include this in my dialog snippet above because I can't recall if I ever said the following, or just thought it, but as it were, my thoughts upon reflecting on this book could be boiled down to one thing: This is the best argument for embracing atheism I've come across in a while. 
 I mean, the premise of the novel is that in the very near future (2019, I think) a radio signal is picked up that is clearly of alien origin. A Jesuit observer gets the bright idea to plug the radio signal into a stereo and hears that it's music. 
 Struck by its beauty, the church funds a surreptitious mission to visit the world it came from (Alpha Centauri - our closest stellar neighbor after our Sun (well, the system is closest to us, the actual closest star is Proxima Centauri, but, the planet they're after is in orbit of Alpha, the brightest of the system's stars, similar to our own sun))- still a tad more than four light years away. 
 After a long journey in a mined out asteroid (I feel like the portrayal of a burgeoning space industry was very plausible, The date of 2019 was too optimistic - maybe by 2050) which took them decades (relativity though, they didn't age very much). They arrived and immediately set out to explore this new world. 
 They go off, meet the locals, and go on a quest to find the source of the beautiful music they've heard. Along the way, every inch of their mission seems to be blessed by God. Our main character bonds with the locals and his fellow travelers are discussing quietly amongst themselves the possibility that he may be a saint, for some of their good fortune might be considered miraculous. 
 Then, like what often happens in a good book, it goes sideways in a hurry and everything they thought they understood about his planet and it's ecosystem was wrong. It gets very dark and that moment of anagnorisis the main character has (The character names are long since forgotten - Another problem with waiting so long before writing about this novel) is where it goes from dark to bottom-up devastatingly awful. 
 Seeing someone fall that way is hard. It's a loss of innocence in the most brutal way possible. I rooted for the characters to succeed, they were motivated by such noble goals, and were willing to sacrifice much to communicate and bond with the creators of this beautiful music. 
 The latter parts of this book were hard to read, and are still hard to think about without getting sad. I'm proud of the author for writing this. It's stunningly effective. I don't get to feel this icky very often, and while I don't enjoy it, it's certainly worth praising the author for making me feel it, and for being unable to look away why everything fell apart. 
 I said before it's a great tract for atheism, I say that half-in jest, but the larger question is raised about why those that dedicate everything to service of whatever they believe God asks of them are not in any way under God's protection, either from nature or from willful malice. There are protracted conversations within the book itself about these issues (it's a specific example of the larger problem of Theodicy, if anyone feels like looking at it). In the end, it's left to the reader to ponder the questions, as they aren't answered. I'm glad she didn't try to (The author - Mary Doria Russell) and left it alone. 
 There is a sequel, honestly, I don't know whether or not I'll read it. This book is very self-contained. I'm not entirely sure I'm ready for another emotional train wreck like I went through with this one. AND - I have a very big pile of books to get through, I'd say we're well into the hundreds at this point. So, if I revisit it, it could be quite a while. 
 I'm giving this four stars, I get the feeling that a few years from now, other books I've rated this well or higher will long since be forgotten, and I'll be thinking about this still. If that's the case, I dunno, I might change my rating. But as it is, I honestly don't enjoy being that distraught reading something. I'm supposed to be deriving some pleasure from it, after all.