Review: Sleeping Giants

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

I had read about this book ages ago, and then when I got an opportunity to read it, I was pretty hyped up about it. Even with high expectations, this book, with an unconventional narrative structure and a cool premise, more than delivered.

The situation is fairly simple - the United States is finding pieces of... something. They're coming up from the earth, wreaking havoc, but they seem to be parts of a giant. A big hand, a leg segment, and so on. What starts as a collection quickly becomes a construction, and the more we learn from the construction the more strange everything seems, both from the perspective of what the weird giant machine is for and for the motives of those involved.

It's such a simple premise, done almost documentary-style in a fly-on-the-wall sort of way. The characters are simple but almost secondary to the overall concept behind the story, and it's a real page turner as a result. The beauty of the book is in its simplicity - we see the plans put into motion, the results, and slowly, more mysteries are revealed.

It's a simple read, popcornish in a sense, but it's exactly what I was looking for in a book like this. Absolutely recommended, especially for a sci-fi palate cleanser.

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