To Sleep In A Sea of Stars

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini is a SciFi novel about an alien relic and a galaxy-wide  war. In To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, we follow Kira as she pays for the simple mistake of curiosity.

“Eat the path, or the path will eat you. To paraphrase an old quote.”

To summarize this book is asking a lot, due to the sheer length of it. This book is almost 900 pages long, and, as I had the audiobook version: 32 hours of listening time. It is well worth the time to read, however, and Paolini does an amazing job of making it not feel like a task.

Kira discovers an alien relic, that binds itself to her. This becomes a Xeno suit, which as the name of “The Soft Blade”. The Soft Blade is actually an ancient entity of sorts, who is familiar with the war that is brewing in the galaxies. As humans are fighting creatures known as Jellies and Nightmares, Kira is finding that The Soft Blade has seen this all before, and it did not end well.

So much happens in the first half of this book. You’ll get 10% in and feel like you’ve read a full 50% of the story- leaving you to wonder, what else could there possibly be?

“Only this, and this alone: circumstances press hard upon us. Soon all that will be left to you, or to any of us, is bare necessity. Before that happens, you must decide.”

“Choose well, Traveler. Think long. Think fast. Eat the path.”

I will admit that I am not the biggest consumer of Sci-fi books, and so I was a little worried picking this one up. However, Paolini writes in such a way that you feel welcomed and encouraged to explore the world he created. His characters all have something you can relate to, even down to the space squids (squidlings? Any splatoon fans?). The end was so magical and interesting to read that I was surprised by it. I had my concerns about how this would end, but Paolini did not disappoint.

The reader for this audiobook does an incredible job. The various voices and simply the way she embodied Kira sucks you in. She did an amazing job, despite the way Netgalley’s audiobook player butchers the audio quality.

This was a 5/5 read, and I would read it again if I had 32 hours to dedicate to it.

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