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.

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.