E-Arc Review: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

Title: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Author: Christopher Paolini
Genre: Adult Sci-fi / Fantasy
Publication Date: September 15th, 2020
Publisher: Tor Books

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an e-copy to review. All opinions are my own.

“It was supposed to be a routine research mission on an uncolonized planet. But when xenobiologist Kira Navárez finds an alien relic beneath the surface of the world, the outcome transforms her forever and will alter the course of human history.

Her journey to discover the truth about the alien civilization will thrust her into the wonders and nightmares of first contact, epic space battles for the fate of humankind, and the farthest reaches of the galaxy.” (Goodreads)

I remember enjoying Eragon when I read it for the first time as a teen. I even liked the movie *gasp*. I know, that’s a pretty unpopular opinion, haha. Sure, it wasn’t as good as the book but I still liked it.

Anyways, when I saw that the same author was going to be writing a new book, but in space, I definitely knew I needed to check it out.

The book starts out like any movie I’ve seen where everything is perfect and then something goes terribly wrong. The action does begin pretty quickly but for that reason I just didn’t feel anything towards the characters that the things were happening too. This was all in the first 5% and so it’s hard to be shocked/sad or whatever because you had no time to really form any bond.

I kept going with this book because you can’t judge a book within that little amount. I will say that I never formed any connections to any of the characters.

There is definitely a lot of infodump and at times there were clunky parts that just left me bored. I feel like the book could have been shrunk a bit and it would still have the same effect.

I did find some of the plot to be good. The aliens were interesting and I like how he executed their communication. The memories/dreams was another nice touch and gave us more information. The romance part of the plot was definitely a letdown. It really could have been taken out and made no difference.

Where the book shines is the technology and descriptions that comes with it. Learning about the ship minds was my favorite part. Gregorovich was very interesting. I can’t remember reading anything like that before.

Overall, I think the negative outweighed the positive. It had its moments but it was still hard to connect with the story as a whole.

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