Sleeping Giants (Themis Files #1)

Lesson learned: read an excerpt before purchasing. The main idea for this book was intriguing, but the style it is written in undermines the story. The WHOLE narrative is written as interviews and excerpts from reports. When I started reading it I hoped it would give away to a more normal writing style; it didn’t. As a result, the interview-narrative style makes the story feel claustrophobic by focusing on a handful of characters. The scope of the event – finding an alien artifact – would have (and is implied) global impact, but the reader never gets that scope or sense of scale. The characters are more interested in their personal, sexual, and emotional lives and the resulting drama than the alien artifact and its consequences, making the book seem shallow and a bit like a soap opera. Mysterious characters are not explained or developed, which just made them distracting. I finished the book, but won’t be reading the sequel; it is written again in the same excerpt fashion.

I wanted to read something fun and light that would also keep my total interest. Too often, I read books where the writing is not enough to pull me in and I am easily distracted from the story. This was the perfect antidote. I had a great time reading this novel, and while it’s not a literary sensation, it’s fabulous entertainment and I can totally see how it could translate well into a movie.

The basic premise is the accidental discovery by a little girl of a gigantic sculpted hand made of unknown metals and housed in panels inscribed with strange symbols. No one knows what it is, except that it’s thousands of years old and defies anything discovered in human history to date. The little girl grows up to become the scientist who studies it and discovers it’s only a piece of a whole–representing a giant metal statue or robot, with its various components scattered throughout the world. So begins a secret hunt to find the pieces, assemble them, and figure out what the heck this thing is, how it got here, and what it’s meant for.

If you like sci-fi and action, this should be at the top of your list. If you dislike “documented interview” or “journal entry” narratives, this may not be for you. I know a lot of people express frustration with this style of writing as being distracting or confusing, and if not well done, it certainly can be. However, I think Sleeping Giants does a great job of keeping the characters straight (mostly by telling you at the top of each chapter who the interview is with), and I think the voices of the characters and the dialogue do a great job of filling in the details of the story. I prefer lots of dialogue in an action story, anyway…reading pages and pages of detail on a supposed action sequence will lose my interest quickly.

Overall, this is a fun read with an interesting plot, so I’m giving 5 stars for its entertainment value and how much I enjoyed it. And I’ll definitely be reading the sequel.

I had this book on my wish list for several months before finally deleting it. Something just didn’t seem compelling about the summary on the back. Then I kept reading about how good it was and that it was optioned for a movie. I decided to go ahead and give it a shot. When I bought it I didn’t know it was going to be in the interview style like World War Z was done in. This is a genre that I do not enjoy. I feel like I’m missing a lot of character building and that certainly was the case with Sleeping Giants. It was very frustrating to not know what was going through the mind of the Army helicopter pilot who drove his truck into one of the others working on the project. Seeing that play out through the interviews of others was very unfulfilling.

This book also caused me to break out of my “suspension of disbelief”. As a lifelong scifi fan I’m fully capable of immersing myself into high concept futuristic novels and accepting that, duhh, what is happening in the book isn’t really possible. In Sleeping Giants we’re presented with a couple of episodes where American military forces challenge Russian autonomy without repercussion. In the first, a military unit goes into a Russian territory to retrieve an alien artifact. There are no consequences to this even after two Russian soldiers are shot and killed. In another, American submarines have a showdown with two Russian subs over an alien artifact on the bottom of the ocean. One of the main characters causes an event that literally obliterates one of the Russian subs, but there are no consequences. These kinds of things just would not happen without provoking a strong response from a foreign power and this really pulled me out of the story as I was pondered with exasperation how this could be possible.

It’s hard not to see how the author had so much trouble getting this book published in the first place. I was unable to get through the book and ultimately put it down 2/3’s of the way through.

I guess I cared enough about what would happen to actually finish the book. But, it was touch and go at times. The style of the book was a series of interviews conducted by the same nameless person who seemed to have more influence than he, at first, let on. At first the style was interesting, but it got old fairly fast. In fact, it seemed implausible that some of the interviews would have been recorded at all, such as the one with the leg surgeon (I won’t give away what it is was about). There weren’t very many plot surprises as the story progressed.

But, to be fair, the book was not all bad. The development of some of the characters was good (including the nameless interviewer). It raised some interesting issues about how we make decisions. Perhaps the author’s next book will be better.

Asdfghshshsbsjs! I am just speechless at how amazing this book was and I am so so excited to start reading the second book! For me, Sleeping Giants is like a hidden gem. I didn’t really know what to expect going into it. All I knew was that the cover was pretty and it was about a scientist who discovers something strange. It sounded pretty good to me!

Deadwood, USA. A girl sneaks out just before dark to ride her new bike. Suddenly the ground disappears beneath her. Walking up at the bottom of a deep pit, she sees an emergency rescue team above her. The people looking down see something far stranger…

That girl grows up to be Dr Rose Franklyn, a brilliant scientist and the leading world expert on what she discovered. An enormous, ornate hand made of an exceptionally rare metal, which predates all human civilization on the continent. But what if we were meant to find? And what happens when this vast, global puzzle is complete…?

Sleeping Giants is told in the form of recordings; these include recordings of interviews between an unknown person and our main characters, recordings of our characters personal journal entries and recordings of experiment logs. I found this form of writing an amazing way to read this type of book as it added another element to the story. The book is this kind of science fiction and fantasy book and because the whole book is based around an experiment, I thought it was clever that the book included recordings: because this is what would happen during any experiment or investigation.

You can see that the format of the book is told through recordings
I also loved plot. Sometimes the plot of ‘the giant hand’ slipped away whilst there was some character arc going on, but overall, the experiment was a massive part of the book – I think I would have liked to see it a bit more at the end though… It sort of… Just disappeared…

“It does not matter. You train your soldiers to kill using video games. They blow enough people up on their computer and it becomes easier for them to kill with a real weapon. Why do you think your government funds so many war and terrorism movies? Hollywood does your dirty work for you. Had 9/11 happened twenty years earlier, the country would have been in chaos, but people have seen enough bad things on their television screen to prepare them for just about anything. We do not really need to talk about government conspiracies.”

– Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

Speaking of the ending: WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH THAT EPILOGUE??!! Once I had finished reading it, I couldn’t believe the words that my eyes had just looked at and I knew that I had to start reading the second book straight away. That epilogue is all a book lover could ask for and just the perfect cliffhanger to keep readers anticipating for the next book. Well done, Neuvel!

Now the characters… For me, all of the characters were absolutely amazing – apart from Ryan Mitchell. I just felt like his story arc was really random and I thought he was a really strange character. Also, Alyssa. No. Just no. I don’t have any problem with the way Neuvel wrote her, I have no problem with her character arc, I just really don’t like her. At all. She is just selfish, self-centred, power hungry, and just plain horrible.

Overall, the only thing – and I mean the only key point – of this book that could have been better was the character of Ryan Mitchell. But I don’t think it was bad enough to make my rating go down to 4 stars as you kind of just forgot about Mitchell.

For me, this is definitely a 5 star book. I loved the extra-terrestrial element of it, I loved the politics, the format, (most) of the characters, and the plot. So, if that doesn’t make you want to read this amazing book, then I don’t know what else will. But I definitely recommend that you give this a go, and you if you don’t like science fiction, I can guarantee that you will still enjoy this book.

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