Although the four books in the Inheritance Cycle series (Eragon and its sequels) were gifted to me a few years ago, I haven't read them yet, so I didn't have any previous knowledge of his work when deciding to read To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. Frankly, the title and artwork caught my eye at a bookstore. I read the blurb and thought it sounded interesting, and it was only when I came back home that it clicked for me that this was the same author.

The initial description gave me some slight Mass Effect vibes, and that is one of my all-time favorite video game franchises. As I have the habit of combining physical reading with listening to the audiobook, it was a great pleasure to realize that Jennifer Hale (who voiced the female version of Shepard in the aforementioned video game franchise) was the narrator – even more ME vibes!

And let's get this established right off the bat: Jennifer Hale is an amazing voice actress, and her narration certainly helped set the tone. She didn't simply quote the dialogue; she acted it out, giving the characters distinct emotions and voices, almost making the experience a radio play.

As for the story itself, I enjoyed it for the most part, although I had a few gripes along the way. It's very plot-driven, fast-paced, and action-packed - humans vs. creatures in a Starship Troopers (the movie adaptation, anyway) style - but there isn't always much to be said about actual character development. In an 800+ pages long book, you need a little bit of that. Otherwise, the plot and action sequences appear drawn out and relentless. The truth is, this was my second attempt at finishing the book, after I had read maybe 40% of it last year and abandoned it, and a lot of the reason for that is how I failed to fully connect with the story and the characters. However, I will say that one of the most interesting characters in the story was the ship mind, Gregorovich.

I wanted to know more about the characters' backgrounds. I wanted a little bit more world-building, but the overall focus ended up being on the interstellar war. And what's also somewhat ironic about that, is that since the narration consistently remains from the main character's point of view, we don't even always see how the war fully unfolds. Shortcuts are taken in the story where, for example, Kira is unconscious, and when she wakes up, the circumstances have developed greatly. So at times, I even wanted to know more about the actual war itself.

Paolini did have some interesting concepts introduced, and while I want to say that not too much it was very new, I can instead say: By now, after so much science fiction material out there, it might be difficult to be 100% original, so it then depends more on how creatively you can utilize known concepts and build on them. Sometimes Paolini succeeded in that, sometimes not. Some of the ideas had me thinking that this story might have been better suited as a movie or in fact, a video game – there's that Mass Effect connection again! But it almost feels like Paolini had that thought himself, as he literally makes video game references at some point.

It seems to me that Paolini set out to write a long science fiction epic, a space opera, an Odyssey-esque journey, but would perhaps have benefited from the book being of a shorter length (thus a more focused storyline), more fleshed out characters, world-building done in a more balanced way. Once the story is concluded, there are some appendixes that expand on some of the in-universe ideas, but I'm inclined to think that had parts of this book been written differently, those bits of information could somehow have been weaved into the plot along the way to give it a stronger vibe of said world-building.

It wasn't terrible, but I wanted it to be better. I'll still give the prequel, Fractal Noise, a chance after this, though.