Book Review: Project Hail Mary

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been listening to the audiobook for Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

5 stars.

I finished it a week or so ago – in the middle of baking and meal prepping before a busy weekend with work.

I made breakfast bowls, blueberry flax muffins, challah bread, and roasted chicken and veggie bowls, by the way. I used the bumblebee mixing bowl my mother-in-law bought me and made challah dough like my mother did when I was a kid.

Anyway, that’s only important because I finished the book and was lucky enough that everything was in a waiting phase because I had to sit down on my kitchen floor and breathe very deeply and very slowly for a few minutes because oh my stars, that was the most beautiful story I’ve read in a very long time.

The sitting down and breathing very calmly was assisted by the kitten and the lab, both of whom tried to sit in my lap. Only one of them fits, but that doesn’t stop a dyslexic theraputically-trained labrador who thinks he’s actually a lap dog, not a lab dog.

I spend a lot of time with the raw edges of humanity, given the work I do. It’s given me some raw edges of my own, but I still love it. I love helping people. I love stepping into their worst days and being able to slow everything down and ground them. I love being there when they need someone, when the problem is too big for them to solve on their own, and even when there’s nothing to do to solve it and all I can do is make it so they’re not alone.

There’s so much joy and love and delight to be found in making someone else feel safe, helping them see that they’re not alone.

And that’s what I found in Project Hail Mary.

There is so much beauty and so much joy and so much wonder about this whole thing we call life, and one of the most beautiful and joyous and wonderful things is that we aren’t alone. To me, Project Hail Mary is about togetherness. It talks about impossible choices and mistakes and failures, but it also talks about why making those choices and fixing those mistakes and trying again after those failures is so important: because there’s something bigger than just our own little individual self, and that something is worth fighting for.

Project Hail Mary was the bright light I needed this month. With everything else going on it’s been easy to forget that I’m not alone in this, but sometimes you need a five-limbed alien to yell “Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!” until you sit up and listen.

Love you, mean it.

-A

💛