#published 1996

This one doesn’t have a rating because I thought the circumstances under which I listened to this book created too much bias. I listened to an (very) unofficial audiobook of this on spotify during a road trip with my sister. I missed a lot of words and lost the thread of what was going on a few times, and instead of trying to pick it up myself I just asked my sister what was going on because she was a real animorphs girl back in the day. So this is going to be something I reread this year; I already have all the ebooks downloaded.

What I will say is this: I cried like a baby during Elfangor’s entire sequence. Like I was staring out the window trying not to show my sister I was crying, and that was WITH some random dude narrating the entire thing in monotone. Genuinely devastating on several levels.

“So God just leaves?” John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. “Abandons creation? You’re on your own, apes. Good luck!”

“No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.”

“Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,” Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. “ ‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’

“But the sparrow still falls,” Felipe said. They sat for a while, wrapped in their private musings.

“You know, he was always a good priest,” Felipe told them, remembering, “but it must have been about the time that they were planning the mission, something changed in him. It was like, I don’t know, sometimes he would just—ignite.” Felipe’s hands moved, making a shape like fireworks. “There was something in his face, so beautiful. And I thought, if that’s what it’s like to be a priest… It was like he fell in love with God.”