She Likes To Read

2026 Reading Challenge 1 of 24: A novel that’s been adapted to film or tv

I have mixed feelings about Project Hail Mary. The parts I love, I really love, but there’s one major issue that prevented this from being a five-star read for me.

The meat of the story— the relationship between Ryland and Rocky— is one of those parts I love. When humans eventually meet aliens, I hope it’s like the encounter between Ryland and Rocky— minus the world-ending threat looming in the background, of course. The friendship between the two of them is so wonderful and pure and optimistic.

The initial contact between the Hail Mary and Blip-A is one of the best alien encounters I’ve read. The slow, methodical communication between the ships, explaining what part of the solar system they’re from, teaching their languages to one another. It’s truly awesome and is such a nice, refreshing change from the typical hostile alien encounter.

I absolutely love Rocky. Even though his story is incredibly heartbreaking, he is still able to remain positive about finding a solution. His personality is adorable and endearing. I love his quirks of repeating things three times for emphasis and adding question to every question. It’s cute. I don’t even care that he’s a scary, stinky spider creature; I would let him watch me sleep.

The ending was very satisfying and heartfelt, although at first, it feels sad learning Ryland doesn’t return to Earth. But him staying on Erid with Rocky feels correct. I teared up a bit when we see him teaching a class of Eridani children. It’s a great ending for his story.

The science in the book seems very well researched and thought out. It was fun to try to solve along with Ryland and Rocky and theorize what the next solution might be (even if I was wrong most of the time).

As much as I love so much of this book, I do still have one major issue with it: the flashbacks.

I don’t think the flashbacks add much of anything to the story and largely drag it down.

The point of a flashback is to let the reader glean new, otherwise unobtainable information about the plot. In the beginning, the story does this by letting us discover who Ryland is with him as he does.

Once we meet Rocky, the flashbacks feel more like interruptions to the interesting part of the story. By this point, we know who Ryland is, and we know why he’s here on the Hail Mary.

We see Ryland throw Ilyukhina and Yao off the ship in the very beginning. So why is so much time spent with them? There’s almost nothing the story can do at this point to get me invested in these characters. When Dubois is introduced, I automatically assumed he’d die since Ryland is the one who ends up on the mission. We know the future, so there is no tension.

The court room flashback in chapter 11 is especially egregious. Not only is it completely unnecessary, but it doesn’t even make sense in the context of the perspective the story is told through. Every other flashback is Ryland recovering his memories told from his perspective. So please explain to me why we’re suddenly subjected to a court case about copyright law that Ryland is not present for?

I don’t think the twist that Ryland was sent on the mission against his will was enough to justify the flashbacks. Ryland is nothing but brave throughout the length of the Hail Mary mission, so learning he was too cowardly to voluntarily go doesn’t hit— he’s already overcome the obstacle before we’re ever introduced to it.

Overall, I really loved Project Hail Mary. Despite it’s flaws, its still a fantastic story about friendship. I’m excited to see the movie when it releases on March 20th. I’m hoping the film adaptation plays to the books’ strengths and edits of some of the unneeded flashbacks.