Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Nuevel

Last Updated on October 5, 2022 by ellen

Just the title “Sleeping Giants” caught my eye. I wasn’t sure at first if it was a science fiction book or some sort of suspense story. Either way, it sounded like the perfect book to relax with over the weekend. I’m trying to spend a little less time working on the weekends and a little more time relaxing. 

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Nuevel

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?

My thoughts:

When I first saw the title, I was intrigued by what it meant. I wasn’t quite sure if it was going to be a sci-fi book, a suspense story, or maybe some kind of apocalyptic warning. In the ending, it turned out to be a little bit of both. In the beginning, after Rose falls into the giant hand, the story is told mostly in a series of interviews led by a mysterious man that we never quite learn more about. With each interview, we learn more about the giant hand and what it’s doing here.

We are also introduced to various characters in the book that play a part in figuring out what the giant hand is and how it can be used. It’s more than just a series of interviews, through the story, we learn how the characters interact with each other and we see how their relationships grow and evolve. I really felt as though I got to know each one even though the story is written mostly from the point of the man conducting the interviews.

In the end, you learn not only the purpose of the giant hand but also why it’s here but only after a series of very poor decisions made by several people in the story. The end left me really wondering whether or not there would be another book to the series, and after checking on Amazon, I see that there is a second book (Waking Gods) that I cannot wait to read.

If you enjoy futuristic stories with a bit of political suspense, you won’t want to miss Sleeping Giants.