Sleeping Giants (Themis Files #1) by Sylvain Neuvel

🌟🌟🌟🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square-shaped 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 - the object's origins, architects, and purpose unknown.

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 relic they seek. What's clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unravelling history's most perplexing discovery-and finally figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?

I heard about sleeping giants from recommendations and reviews from people whose book taste I tend to agree with. I haven't read a lot of adult scifi so I wasn't sure exactly what to expect going into this book. I tried to go into the book fairly blind but I knew it had something to do with a girl falling into a hole and having to be rescued by the fire department. She later finds out she had fallen into what appears to be a giant robotic hand and the book continues from that point.
The book is written in a mixed media format much like Sadie, Illuminae, and Daisy Jones and the Six. I'm sure that it would lend itself well to audio book like those but is still a great ebook read. I would say that the story is more character driven due to it being told through interviews, electronic journal entries, and experimental logs. I have found that I really enjoy this type of format because it is easy to read and makes the story more real somehow. I really enjoyed the characters especially Rose and "you know who"(we never get his name). I related most to Rose and found myself intrigued by "you know who". He appears like a shadow with the information he knows about everyone without actually being in the room and at times I felt he may have been a sociopath. I thought all of the characters were complex and drove the story very well. There were twists and turns which were sometimes due to the characters motivations whether well intention or not that had disastrous consequences. I think that if you liked a book like Illuminae or if you were wanting something more from Illuminae then you should read this book. It's a great intro to adult scifi. It's easy to read and not get lost in the science as well as thought provoking.