ARC Review: Sleeping Giants

Title: Sleeping Giants
Author: Sylvain Neuvel
Genre: Science fiction

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Goodreads Summary:A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near her home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.
Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved—its origins, architects, and purpose unknown. Its carbon dating defies belief; military reports are redacted; theories are floated, then rejected.
But some can never stop searching for answers.
Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top secret team to crack the hand’s code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the provenance of the relic. What’s clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unraveling history’s most perplexing discovery—and figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result prove to be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?

I cannot say enough good things about this book!

This was one of those books that I opened up to the first page of the prologue and then immediately started smiling because I knew this was going to be good. The prologue captured my imagination and catapulted me into a world where aliens or gods or supernatural beings somehow left pieces of their soldiers buried beneath the earth, only to rise thousands of years later. It's one of the most unique sci-fi books I've read, and I really enjoyed how science-y it was while still being character-centric.

The tone of this book was very reminiscent of World War Z, with a dispassionate, almost clinical interviewer showing us his recordings and notes as he tries to piece together an event of global scale. The narrator is incredibly mysterious, and all you ever find out about him is that he will do anything in the pursuit of truth. I really enjoyed getting to know all the other characters, even the ones we only got to hear from once or twice. All of them risk a lot when they get involved with the Themis project, and you really see the emotional impact of what they go through. I was not expecting to get so emotionally involved in such a cool science fiction novel, but I was near tears multiple times.

Some random other notes: brownie points for so many intelligent and capable women in a military/hard-science sci-fi novel, because usually that's a man's world. Also, that cover is absolutely gorgeous!

This book is just so much fun. I'm keeping this review short because I don't want to spoil anything. There are so many twists and turns and revelations made throughout the book, and the characters all grow tremendously as they try to make sense of their world on a scale far bigger than they imagined possible. This was one of my favorite books from 2015, and I highly highly recommend it!

A free eARC was provided by Random House Del Rey in exchange for an honest review