Peach's Reviews > Fractal Noise

Side note: I am not here to make some sort of political statement about my opinions on the industry. This is a space to review books and that is exactly what I’ll be doing - nothing more, nothing less.

Ugh… I’m so disappointed. This was one of my top ten most highly anticipated books for the year and it really let me down. After reading To Sleep in a Sea of Stars and it becoming one of my favorite books of all time, I had really high hopes for finally getting another book in this universe. But this prequel lacked everything I loved so much about the first book in this series, and failed to add any depth to the overall arc of the story world itself.

I felt zero connection with any of the characters. All of them were surface level at best. The protagonist had no other qualities to speak of except mourning the loss of his wife, but we couldn’t even empathize with him because we got no real glimpse into their relationship whatsoever. Two of the other characters were melodramatic caricatures and over-the-top with seemingly having only the purpose of creating meaningless conflict over their religious beliefs.

The plot itself is thus: a team finds a hole on a supposedly uninhabited planet and ventures to discover its secrets. And that’s literally it. It was a really boring slog to read through. It takes the entirety of the book for them to actually get to the hole and even then we learn absolutely not one single thing about who made it, why, how, when, etc. Honestly, the entire story seemed rather pointless in the end. We learned nothing, we experienced nothing, and it added absolutely nothing to this series. Other than the fractal pattern, there are no connections to anything else.

I’m really at a loss for this book. I don't know what happened here. I would have never guessed this as being written by Paolini nor of being a part of the Fractalverse series. Fans of To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, you can honestly just skip it.

The one think I liked was the dramatic audiobook narration with the sound effects, which really added to the immersion of the story and kept me engaged.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me an advanced copy in exchange for my honest feedback. I voluntarily read and reviewed this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.