➽ I was curious about Sleeping Giants because it's a pretty popular sci-fi! I really enjoy mixed-media books and the audiobook has a full cast, so I was excited to check it out. Sleeping Giants is about a young girl called Rose who discovers a giant metal hand. Years later, she's leading a research time to find out more about the bizarre artefacts that have been left all over the world. The body parts are supposed to make up a giant figure, but there seem to be even more secrets hiding within them! I liked the idea and the fact that the story is told in journal entries and interviews! Unfortunately, unlike other similar books (such as The Illuminae Files) I didn't enjoy Sleeping Giants, as I wasn't engaged in the story.

➽ I had such a hard time caring for any of the characters. They didn't have much depth and the interview format worked against connecting to anyone in this book. I think it would have been better to focus on Rose since she has a personal connection to the hand and reframe the story from her perspective. I also wasn't a big fan of the included forced romances, as they felt out of place. I wanted more focus on the giants and less on the romantic drama in the research team.

➽ Another big issue was that I despised the unnamed interviewer, he was always acting so smug and superior. Since 80% of the files are interviews, he showed up all the time. We never really find out who he is, so it's hard to tolerate him when he's constantly manipulating and insulting the people he interviews. I actually liked him more in the very end, as he finally loses his composure instead of being this insufferable know-it-all. I just found all the interviews so offputting, since the interviewer constantly lets you know how powerful he is and that he seemingly can solve all the problems.

➽ In general, I was just disappointed by this story. It wasn't engaging and the only hook happens in the epilogue, but still isn't enough to make me want to read the sequels. I feel like the story was all over the place with all the military operations and discussions of war I didn't care about. So much went over my head and the mystery of the giant should have been the focus. I don't think I ever understood why everyone was so obsessed with this research, the story failed to establish the personal and bigger stakes. 

i honestly really wanted to like this, as it was marketed as some alien giant robot story and told in interview format like world war z. and while those still remain true, it felt as if the giant alien robot wasn’t even that central to the story. it read more like a political novel with sci-fi interspersed throughout, and definitely more of a prologue to the rest of the series than a good novel that stands up on its own. all of the characters, including our mysterious interviewer, just kind of fell flat for me and it read more boring than entertaining.

and don’t get me started on the romance subplot forced into here. man was that not fun to read. i will say that the premise did hold some merit, which is why it isn’t a one star read, but the author definitely fell short on execution.

will i read the next book(s)? probably because i hate an incomplete narrative. will i like them? probably not

I would recommend listening to this book, I listened to the audiobook over a few long drives and it was fantastic. The characters are super engaging, the story is fascinating and I love sci-fi which focuses on the human reaction to alien things. There are a lot of serious topics touched upon in this but none are in too much depth. 

Hovering around 3.75-4 stars.

This was a book where my star rating went up the more as I read the book. It started as a pretty "meh" 3 out of 5, but the score had risen by the time I reached the end.

It had an intriguing premise: a mysterious, giant hand is uncovered by a young girl in her backyard. As the years go on, the journey to find the other parts of whatever enormous robotic body it belonged to unfolds, along with the mission to find out what exactly it is and what it does. But it wasn't just the premise that caught my interest: the format did as well. Instead of traditional narrative prose, the book is told in epistolary format. It uses the form of documents and transcripts, but mostly interviews between characters to tell the story. For me, the epistolary format is a bit of a mixed bag. It can be a very intriguing way to tell a story and give it a certain kind of tone/atmosphere...but it's a common shortcoming that due to their nature, epistolary novels often suffer from a very bad case of "telling, not showing." I've read books in this format that were just exposition dump after exposition dump, and it gets to be a drag to read. 

This one was a pretty engaging read. I was pretty invested in the plot. I wanted to read on as the characters worked to untangle the mystery of the giant robotic hand and see what would happen. Also, with the interview format, I found the characters decently captivating, and the author did a good job giving the main characters their voices and showcasing their personality through their words only, which I consider pretty hard to do since you can't use described action to show what these characters are like. Certain developments in the plot got me hooked enough to want to keep going and events happening to characters took me for a surprise. 

I have some complaints with the book: it does sort of fall into the exposition dump from time to time, but it is by no means bad, in my viewpoint. It also suffers from a common epistolary problem in that sometimes, characters say things in supposed "interviews" that don't sound natural, since you're supposed to believe that the characters are saying this out loud in a conversation (I cannot imagine anyone saying with any kind of natural tone a sentence like "he had leathery-esque skin" out loud to someone else). A big plot complaint is, without any spoilers, how we get the "explanation" for the giant robot body parts. It seemed to come absolutely out of nowhere with no build-up, no foreshadowing, just dump a random exposition character in there.

On that last note...to be fair, this is the first in a trilogy of books, and it may be meant to be explored in the later books. The book ends on a cliffhanger, and a pretty intriguing one...

All in all, a pretty good book that's held back by some flaws, but an enjoyable read with a unique format!

When a giant hand is discovered underground in South Dakota, the world will never be the same.

I really enjoyed this book. I listened to the audiobook and it was almost like listening to a play with all the different actors. Even though the story was written in a way that the reader didn’t get the minute details of everything you would normally get in a sci-fi kind of novel, it was just so enthralling. I quite liked all the characters, I laughed out loud a few times, I just overall really enjoyed the experience of listening to this story. 

There were parts of the story that were a touch cheesy. The romance angle was a little bit eye-roll inducing, but not so much as to overshadow the whole story. 

 Finished reading: September 7th 2023

It's true that I don't usually read a lot of sci-fi, and especially when there are aliens involved... But there was something about Sleeping Giants that made me curious ever since it was first published back in 2016. I guess my TBR jar thought it was time I finally gave this first book of a trilogy a chance, and I'm very glad this title popped up now. Why? I have to say that I was very much impressed by Sleeping Giants! There was just something about this story that was both addictive and able to make you feel humble at the same time. The fact that you don't exactly know what is going on only adds to the suspense, and it was absolutely fascinating learning more about what was being discovered. The writing style itself stands out as it is told through interviews, diaries and other files, but somehow the story was still very readable. It makes you wonder what would happen if such a discovery would be made in real life, and how the people involved would react... The different characters involved added humanity to the story and while I could have done without the love triangle, in general I enjoyed learning more about them. And after how things ended, I also can't wait to pick up the sequel to see what will happen next! 

Good story. Sometimes events were just too convenient.