To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Book Review

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Book Review

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Book Review

Hello friends! This is officially my last post of February and I cannot believe the time is going by so fast. Check out my To Sleep in the Sea of Stars Book Review down below!

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To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Book ReviewTitle: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

Author: Christopher Paolini

Rating: 3 Stars

Genre: Science Fiction

Content Warnings: Death, aliens, mild body horror

Format: Paperback

Publisher: PanMacmillan SA

Date Published: September 15th 2020

Goodreads Description: Kira Navárez dreamed of life on new worlds. Now she’s awakened a nightmare. During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, Kira finds an alien relic. At first, she’s delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move.

As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a galaxy-spanning odyssey of discovery and transformation. First contact isn’t at all what she imagined, and events push her to the very limits of what it means to be human.

While Kira faces her own horrors, Earth and its colonies stand on the brink of annihilation. Now, Kira might be humanity’s greatest and final hope…

I received a review copy from PanMacmillan SA. All opinions are my own.

Review

I don’t quite know how to put this book into words. It is dense. Even though it’s 880 pages, it feels like it was 8000 pages. There’s so much information on-page, and at the same time, it feels like there’s nothing going on.

Characters – 6/10

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars essentially has one protagonist, Kira, and a whole host of “main” side characters, the crew of the Wallfish.  For an 800 page behemoth of a book, we spend shockingly little time with these characters. There are these moments in the book when you can exactly pinpoint the “insert character backstory here” signs. Aside from those moments, I don’t feel like there’s enough to connect the reader to the characters.

We spend a lot of time in Kira’s head, which gets extremely tedious towards the end. I couldn’t help but compare her to the MC of The Martian (who also spends much of the page time alone with his own thoughts) and she came up short. In the end, I had to switch to the audiobook because I just could not get through all the thinking.

I mostly liked the crew of the Wallfish. I wish we had some more obvious LGBTQ rep (it’s only implied between two female crew members) and I wish we could have spent more time with them. Falconi and Kira though are my ship, just FYI.

Atmosphere – 6/10

I love space, and I love stories set in space. You can clearly see Paolini did his homework. There’s a lot of worldbuilding and tech babble, which makes for a well-rounded world. However, I think this book would have been better if it was split in two. There’s just too much going on. We have to take in so much tech-speak and there’s so much information on-page that things just get lost in the sauce.

If this were a duology, we might have understood the world, the conflict, and the characters better.

Writing – 5/10

As I said, there’s just too much going on. There’s so much happening on a single page that it’s difficult to process. I had to switch to the audiobook because I was seriously considering DNFing at the 300-page mark.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Book Review

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Plot – 6/10

It’s alright. I really hated the last 100-ish pages of this book, and the ending just drove me up the wall. The plot is nothing new, we’ve seen the aliens invade thing before. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is also incredibly slow-moving, so buckle up if you want to read this one.

Intrigue – 5/10

I had a hard time believing the conflict in this story. The humans are basically being attacked by the Jellies (a silly name for aliens, that doesn’t exactly inspire fear). And while the Jellies may be the most accurate of aliens we might someday find, I struggle to understand the conflict. There are some very confusing timelines involved, as well as a pointless expedition to find an alien artefact. I wasn’t as intrigued as I should have been.

Logic – 5/10

Paolini definitely deserves a lot of credit for the research that went into this book. I could see the technology he describes as someday becoming a reality. He did indeed write a space-epic, and it’s awesome.

Enjoyment – 5/10

I know I mentioned a lot of negative things about To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, but overall it wasn’t a bad book. It wasn’t entirely for me, but I did enjoy some parts. If you like big, sweeping space adventures, aliens and shooting, this one is for you.

Let me know your thoughts on To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (book review).

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6 thoughts on “To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Book Review

  1. I listened to this on audiobook. I am not a fan of science fiction but I was able to really enjoy the story. I did have to get into the Worldbuilding, but maybe the audiobook was helpful in that regard.

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