While I did enjoy To Sleep in a Sea of Stars to a degree, one of my gripes with it was that at 800+ pages, the plot seemed very drawn out for the sake of length, which could make it a bit tedious. Now, I don't always care if a book is several hundred pages long, but in this case, when I was ready to start reading the prequel, Fractal Noise, I was hoping that the fact that this book was shorter meant that the story was more compact - more "focused" - so that nothing felt like unnecessary padding. I suppose I was right about that. This read was ultimately a smoother ride.

Also, I did my usual trick of reading the book and listening to the audiobook simultaneously (for better concentration), and was pleased to hear that the lovely Jennifer Hale was the narrator once again. Regardless of how I rate the actual books themselves, Hale absolutely knows how to bring the story to life through her narration, and adds emotion and suspense in the dialogue.

While, as mentioned, the story is more to-the-point this time, I still have some of the same gripes as with the first novel. Overall, the book is more plot-driven than anything, and never really indulges in digressions, has the bare minimum of backstory, and so forth. The main character, Alex, is really the only one we have the chance to get somewhat emotionally invested in because of some elements from his past, but all the other characters are reduced to their profession and specific character traits; thus, they have no real backstory, are one-dimensional and their character development is next to non-existent.

Fractal Noise is quite tonally different than ...Sea of Stars, which I actually liked. The previous book was more of a full-blast space war, while this one appears to attempt a more philosophical approach, symbolized through the characters' long journey to reach and explore an anomaly. Essentially, this entire story is about The Great Beacon on Talos VII, which was briefly mentioned in the first book as one of the first signs of alien intelligence in the universe.

When it comes to the philosophical approach above, parts of the story have a sort of faith vs. science element to it. However, both sides of the argument come across as somewhat on-the-nose and stereotypical. So much like the characters themselves, Paolini didn't go deep enough with this, and it was mostly reduced to the characters arguing amongst themselves in a "Religion, good!", "No, religion bad!" kind of way.

I can only repeat what I said about ...Sea of Stars: I found this enjoyable to a degree, but wanted to like it a lot more.