The Sound of Stars

By: Alechia Dow

Narrated by: Joy Sunday, Christian Barillas

Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's Summary

Can a girl who risks her life for books and an alien who loves forbidden pop music work together to save humanity? A beautiful and thrilling debut novel for fans of Marie Lu and Veronica Roth.

Two years ago, a misunderstanding between the leaders of Earth and the invading Ilori resulted in the deaths of one-third of the world’s population. 

Today, 17-year-old Ellie Baker survives in an Ilori-controlled center in New York City. With humans deemed dangerously volatile because of their initial reaction to the invasion, emotional expression can be grounds for execution. Music, art, and books are illegal, but Ellie still keeps a secret library. 

When young Ilori commander M0Rr1S finds Ellie’s library, he’s duty-bound to deliver her for execution. The trouble is, he finds himself drawn to human music and in desperate need of more. 

Humanity’s fate rests in the hands of an alien Ellie should fear, but M0Rr1S has a potential solution - thousands of miles away. The two embark on a wild and dangerous journey with a bag of books and their favorite albums, all the while creating a story and a song of their own that just might save them both.

©2020 Alechia Dow (P)2020 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited

Epic love story that transcends time and space.

I loved the story about the YA book reading human girl crossing paths with an alien invader hiding his own secret obsession for music. Fast paced with no filler. My only problem with the audiobook is with the performance. Every time the narrator is supposed to say “library”, she says “li-berry”, to the extent that “librarian” is even “li-berry-an”. Also, the main character is M0Rr1s, with the narrator pronounces as M-zero-one-nes, completely ignoring the Rs. For much of the book I couldn’t figure out why some humans were changing his name to Morris, until I finally went back to the printed description and saw his name. Had the narrator pronounced it M-zero-R-R-one-S (like it should be) the nickname would have made sense. Was super surprised in the apparent lack of quality assurance over the recording. Anyway, if you can get past those things, it is a good story and beyond pronunciation mistakes, the narrator otherwise did a good job.

The Perfect Companion for a Roadtrip

Wow, this was an incredible surprise! This story kept my attention for a 10-hour car drive. Literally, did not do anything else on my drive but listen to this, and I loved it! The story is fresh, hopeful, adorable, and sprinkled with incredible literary & pop-music references. All of Morris's chapters are titled with a song, so I would pause the audiobook after each chapter and listen to the accompanying song. It really helped me fully immerse myself into the emotions of the book & characters. I now have a whole Spotify playlist titled "Sound of the Stars" with all the songs mentioned in this book: like a beautiful book soundtrack. THAT'S how much I loved it! Try it out!

This book is SO good

I binged all the way through. its the best book I've read in a long time

THIS BOOK!!!!

I LOVED THIS BOOK SO GOSH DARN MUCH, MY GOSH GIVE ME A THOUSAND MORE BOOKS IN THIS UNIVERSE AND ILL BE JUST LIKE JANELLE AND CARRY THEM ALL UNTIL THE END OF TIME!

Brown girl with stars in her eyes.

This was a beautiful, honest depiction of a young black girl with conflicting feelings about her world and what is to come, trying to hold on to hope. I loved this story.

Captivating

What an enchanting novel. I dearly hope there is a book two coming in the future!

Falls flat when the Alien ‘wants music’

I really missed on this one. Had a good plot until the alien wants music. Delete, delete, delete

Painful slog

This book was so painful. There is a story here but the author got lost, words for the sake of words, lost. The narration, I don’t even know what to say except maybe work needs to be done on enunciation! Save yourself and your credit!