This book far surpassed my expectations, having me laughing and crying and cringing and thinking and feeling anxious and hopeful all in turn. The narration features an interesting mix of 13 year old boy humor and advanced interdisciplinary science (made shockingly accessible), and somehow that balance works and the book ended up highly readable. I really liked how much I felt like I was right there alongside the characters experiencing what they were, and how invested that got me in the story. It was emotional and extremely interesting and deeply philosophical, all in all I absolutely recommend it and am excited for the movie!

This book was such a joy to read. I think that was my favorite part about it - it was a shockingly fun and optimistic read despite the fact that the book basically focuses on Earth's imminent demise through the Sun dimming. There were challenges, setbacks, and major losses, and yet Project Hail Mary is fundamentally a book about cooperation and working together to get through all those things. While I might be too cynical to believe humans would work so well together if the events of Project Hail Mary happened in real life today, the beauty of fiction, especially science fiction, is that we can escape into a world that where the problems of the present don't have to follow us.

I loved how science seeped into almost every page of Project Hail Mary. We weren't just being told about how new technologies like Astrophage, xenonite, or Taumoeba worked - we actively got to discover them alongside Grace as he ran experiment after experiment. I loved that the book highlighted the creative, almost playful aspects of being a scientist. As I'm sure is the case for most readers, Rocky and his relationship with Grace were by far my favorite part of the book. Grace himself I didn't particularly care for. He seems to be almost a copy-paste of Weir's protagonist in the Martian, whom I also never really liked due to his boyish sense of humor and inability to shut up about how smart he is, but the rest of the novel is so good that I didn't mind. Overall, an incredibly fun read that I think would be even better as an audiobook!