To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

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Kira Navárez is a xenobiologist researching a new planet when she discovers an alien artifact. The world will never be the same.

The beginning of the novel starts fairly quickly; you're introduced to a cast of characters whose mission is to research uncolonized Adrasteia and then things quickly go awry. Kira accidentally discovers an alien room and organism when the crew is about to leave the planet. What follows is a story of the discovery of intelligent life, and what happens when humans are confronted with sentient beings 200 years in our future.

I was completely engrossed in Kira's story from the beginning and was interested to learn about the alien technology as she learned it herself. After Kira leaves Adrasteia for her journey through space, I lost interest in her story. There is a lot of monotony -- tests run on her several times and Kira being shuffled from ship to ship. The cast of non-military characters introduced in this section were the only interesting developments; these people end up being Kira's companions for much of her journey. Roughly halfway through, the book begins to focus on the war and the action makes the plot exciting again.

This novel is long. It was close to being a DNF (did not finish) title for me because the middle drags on. Large chunks of this book are unnecessary and could be removed. It feels like Paolini has been working on the novel for a long time and was reluctant to give up certain parts that weren't needed. The slower sections could have been condensed to give information without drawing it out into a saga.

Admittedly, I'm not the biggest fan of hard sci-fi. Still, the overarching story here is interesting but the execution is flawed. To emphasize this, the story part of the audiobook ends two hours before the end of the recording. The last two hours are addendums and appendices filled with scientific jargon that will be overwhelming to the average reader. There are entries on space combat, alien languages, timelines, technology... Does this information needed to be included to understand the story? No. It makes even less sense to include these after the story if they're needed to understand it.

Jennifer Hale is a great narrator and has different accents for characters that help give them extra personality. You can definitely tell that she is a popular voice actor because of her narration skills. Her voices make it clear which character is speaking, so the conversations with the aliens where they say "Kira here" or whomever before they speak seem incredibly repetitive.

Recommended for science fiction fans, especially those interested in space travel, interplanetary wars, and first contact stories.

Christopher Paolini is the bestselling author of the Eragon series. He lives in Montana. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is his first science fiction novel.

Publisher: Macmillan Audio (audiobook), Tor (print)

Narrator: Jennifer Hale

Running Time: 27 hours

Release Date: September 15, 2020

I received an electronic audio recording of this title from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.