By Declan - 12 years old

***SPOILER ALERT*** - This book is full of surprises. Do not read on if you want many of the secrets of the book revealed.

In Project Hail Mary we meet Ryland Grace, a biologist who wakes up on a spacecraft with no idea who he is or what he’s doing there. He quickly finds out that he was sent to Tau Ceti, a star 9 light years away from the sun, to figure out how to stop the sun from dimming. In the story there is an alien organism called astrophage that is slowly eating away at the sun and he has to figure out why Tau Ceti isn’t dimming. If he can figure that out he can save Earth from the astrophage. However, along the way he meets an alien from a completely different star system that is also there to try to save his home planet. So he has to work together with the alien and save Earth before time runs out. In order to do this though he has to take samples of the astrophage to find out that there is a predator only present in the Tau Ceti star system. Additionally this alien cannot handle any nitrogen which is present on both planets that they need to plant it on. So they have to breed them in order to slowly make them nitrogen resistant and save their planets.

In this book the most used setting in the book is the spaceship that Grace is on. This spaceship has engines in the back that uses astrophage capable of sending it at 0.92 times the speed of light. In front of that is the coma room where Grace woke up in at the start that consists of three beds and a robot system capable of watching him and his deceased crewmates. In front of that is a lab that has a centrifuge attached to it to take tests. In the front is a control room that allows Grace to control the whole ship and has an airlock attached to it. The other setting that he is frequently in is a tunnel that the alien he met met. The tunnel is made of a mysterious material named xenonite that is composed of primarily xenon. It has a slab of clear xenonite in the middle separating their air and is hexagonial shaped.

The character that I have to choose that changed through the book was Grace because he thought he volunteered for a suicide mission and then realized he was forced to do it. However, at the end of the book he volunteered for another suicide mission to save the alien and his planet despite the fact that the alien gave him enough fuel to go home. It shows how at first he thought he was brave and kind, but realized he had no choice. However as the story develops we see that he becomes great friends with the alien and in the end sacrifices himself to save the alien and bring him back to his home world.

I can relate to this book because it is about not giving up. Grace had so many difficult challenges throughout the book and just kept going. For example when he started he didn’t know his name or what he was doing and saw dead people next to him. Then he figured out that he had to save Earth from Astrophage. He had to figure out how to communicate with an alien and how to sink a chain into a planet’s atmosphere to collect samples; while he was staying in a really low orbit at an angle to not fall into the planet. He then figured out that he was a coward and didn’t actually volunteer. This was all a lot to take for him and shows that he kept having to overcome these physical and mental challenges to save his planet.

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