#57 To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini, Jennifer Hale (Narrator)

This is a monster of a book that I got as an audio book to review. The book starts with a terraforming crew leaving ahead of colonists arriving when a drone goes offline. At the drone site Kira sees something unusual and checks it out. She finds alien tech that invades her and is rescued by her coworkers. They find nothing wrong with her but she is was in cryo for a month while they run tests on her and everyone that was exposed at the site. Almost as soon as she is woken up the tech awakens and bonds with her. The government ship that oversaw clearing her of infection is now testing her and the alien tech to find out about it. This doesn’t go on for too long before an unknown alien ship arrives and attacks the ship she is on. What looks like a possible rescue of the alien tech turns out to be an invasion force of still another alien. Now Kara has to convince humanity that she can help and not hurt them all while they are facing an unknown force that seems to have them outgunned with advanced technology.

There is a large cast of characters, but everything works well in the storyline and I would like to see more in this setting. The ending does leave room for more in this story universe with either Kara or someone else to read about.

With the audiobook being so long I didn’t lose track of any of the story. The downside doing this an audio I didn’t realize there are appendices at the end of the book but I could figure out what things were by the context of the story. There is also an interview at the end of the book between the author and the narrator. Between that and the afterward read by the writer you get some insight into the process of writing the book.

Audio review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley