Review: Sleeping Giants

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Rose cannot wait to ride her new bike, the one with the tassels on the end, so she sneaks out the house and cycles off. Something distracts her and she leaves her bike at the edge of the trail and climbs down to see what was making the light… Some time later she comes to, finding herself in a perfectly square hole with her father looking down at her. After they had got her out and back home, one of the firemen asked if she would like to see some photos, she was at the bottom of a hole lying in the centre of a giant metal hand surrounded by glowing symbols.

Skip forward a few year and that girl is now Dr Rose Franklin and the world’s leading expert of the item that she inadvertently discovered. The hand defies all logic. It is made of iridium, normally a super rare metal and the weight of the object does not tally with its volume. Everything about it is strange. The research into it is now higher than top secret after they realised that there are other parts of the body scattered around the world after accidently discovering one in Turkey. The race is on to find them all before other countries work out what the Americans are looking for, and then they might, just might be able to understand the significance of their discoveries. But will they get the significance, and just who is this guy who keeps asking the most probing questions.

Overall this is quite a good book, I liked its innovative plot and concept of this artefact having been left by a race utterly unknown to us that we could only begin to find when we had reached a certain point in our technological development. I like some of the ‘interview style’ prose, it added drama and a sinister edge, but after a while it did get a bit much as it slowed down the narrative at times. Worth reading though as It as the sci-fi addition gives us a completely different take on the world domination political thriller genre. 3.5 Stars

View all my reviews