To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is the first book in the Fractal Verse by Christopher Paolini. It tells the story of Kira Navarez, a young exobiologist who is working on a survey mission on a supposedly uncolonized planet. When she stumbles upon an unknown alien relic things start getting difficult though. The rest of her survey team, including her new fiancé, end up dead and she is placed in military custody and then in isolation upon a research vessel. Kira quickly discovers that the alien relic is actually an alien symbiotic exosuit that is practically sentient as it ends up rampaging through the military research vessel when it gets attacked. Being the sole survivor Kira works on traveling back to the area of space heavily settled by humans only to arrive and discover that war has broke out during her travels. Rescued by a trade ship she learns that due to the exosuit she may be the only human capable of understanding and translating the language of the alien attackers. Now Kira must work on finding out what prompted the war and how it ties into the existence of the exosuit and from there work on potentially stopping the war.
Having previously read Paolini with his Inheritance series I was prepared for a good read. I was not expecting an incredible read such as this ended up being. That was mostly because I wasn’t sure how well Paolini would be able to change genres as I know very few authors are able to change genres like that. This book ended up being just as good as his previous books and I am definitely going to continue reading this series. What really drew me in was the protagonist though. Kira was this great character that had so many different and numerous facets to her that I was really blown away by how well developed she was. I have seen this in his previous books but it was great to see continued here. The amount of development she gets over the course of the book is just as important as she ends the story being a drastically different person in many ways than she was at the beginning. It was nice to watch happen though. On top of the incredible character though was the even more incredible plot though. It starts out as one thing, Kira trying to figure out what to do about the alien exosuit, and ends up spanning this galactic conflict between numerous races. What made it really interesting, at least to me, is the incredible intricacies in regard to how the war developed and how it ties into the existence of the alien exosuit and Kira and any number of other numerous events. Honestly, so many different things happened that it could have been a whole series instead of just one rather long book. It does make me incredibly interested in what is going to happen in the rest of the series. I can genuinely say that this book was absolutely incredible, which I am not really surprised by considering the author, but it does mean that I am also happy to give this book 4.5 out of 5 stars.
This book was a great example of science-fiction so if you enjoy that kind of work than you should consider trying this one out. Especially if you enjoy space epics with alien and galactic conflict of some type and sentient spaceships and other similar things. It has a lot of pretty cool elements that should appeal to fans of science fiction. I would however recommend that it should only be read by adults as it does contain some minor adult content and references and quite a bit of rather gruesome and heavily depicted violence throughout the story. None of that detracts from the story as I think a lot of it adds to the story but it is something to be aware of. Overall it is still a pretty good book and I hope you will consider trying it out if it sounds interesting. If you do try it consider sharing your thoughts in the comments.