To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, by Christopher Paolini

ISBN: 9781529046526
Amazon ID: B0855R6PLR

This is a long book, partly simply because of the big gaps between chapters. One chapter ends, it's followed by a blank page with merely a short vertical thin line on it, then there's a page with the next chapter number and a row of seven dots, and then there's a page bearing the chapter title, and the story continues. All a bit redundant, really. At least I don't own a dead tree edition of the book.

The book is also broken down in curious ways: it consists of six "parts", each of which comprises up to 13 chapters, and each chapter is split into numbered sections. All in all it makes for quite a strange system for referencing something in the book: Part III, Chapter V, Section 2, for example.

My overall summary is that this is a big book, and it doesn't need to be. Far too much mundane stuff gets described, and even in the "exciting" scenes, you feel that descriptions are long-winded and drawn-out, when the style could be much tighter and the pace of the story maintained (or, maybe, created).

Once you get into Part IV, things are really dragging, and you wonder how it's going to be possible to get through the last third of the book. For me, by the time I got the end of Part IV, I needed a break. I just had to read something else, with a sense of pace, activity, and story to it. The book nearly fell into the "gave up in despair" category, however I did persevere after reading a couple of others which were worth it.

This book is rather like reading Lord of The Rings, but where the characters have no sense of purpose or objective. In LoTR, you know that the purpose is to defeat Sauron, and after a while it becomes clear that the objective is to reach the Crack of Doom. The story works well with that knowledge.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is not like that - you have no sense of the story having a purpose, or an objective; an end-point to which the characters are trying to get. It's just one episode after another, one situation / location / activity after another, and there's no sense of "are we getting there yet?" mainly because we have no idea where "there" is.

Perhaps this is a good analogy for many people's real lives, but it doesn't make for good story-telling.

Even once you get to within 10% of the end of the book, and it seems like most of the action is over, except for one final achievement which the central character has to accomplish, the book is slow and stodgy. There are just far too many words for what is happening.

Finally, the book ends.

The central character has transmuted into some inexplicably powerful entity able to create almost anything in virtually zero time, and ends with a Galadriel-like ceremony of giving gifts (and is at the time even referred to by one of the other characters as "O Ring Giver").

I'm slightly glad I made it to the end, but my recommendation is not even to start.

The principal protagonist emanates from a planet call Weyland. I'm reminded of the company behind the expedition in Alien, which was Weyland-Yutani.

In Part I, we get two strong reminders of the original Alien story between chapters IV and VII, and then The Martian storyline pops up in chapter IX.

In Part III, someone loses an arm. Not long afterwards she's given a cup of warm liquid to drink and she "wrapped her hands around the warm mug". Neat trick.

In Part IV, we get a reference to "transparent aluminium" (mis-spelled in American, of course), which clearly comes directly from Star Trek.

In Part V, "everything quivered with the physical equivalent of a scream". Er, sorry, but I thought a scream was physical. If not, what is it?

I'd never noticed it before reading this book, but (comments in brackets) can be very distracting and seem entirely inappropriate in a novel. Authors, stick to commas.

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