Yuffie's Book Reviews

Sleeping Giants - by Sylvain Neuvel

Sleeping Giants was recommended to me by a friend, and the premise sounded so cool, so I picked up a copy. It's about people finding body parts of a giant impossibly ancient robot scattered across the earth, buried underground. The US government puts together a team to find and collect the pieces and assemble the robot, which must be of alien origin because the technology is ridiculously advanced, yet it dates back to the stone age. Really intriguing premise.

The main characters are Kara - a badass white chick with attitude problems who's an ace helicoptor pilot in the military and is drop-dead gorgeous and brings all the boys to the yard, Ryan - Mr. Captain America military dude who looks like an underwear model, and Vincent - an introverted Canadian linguist.

Despite my quips about Kara and Ryan looking at supermodels, the book was not full of special snowflakes and Mary Sues. The characters actually have really bad shit happen to them as a direct consequence of their shitty actions! Yay for character accountability! The plot was fantastic. The progression of events and the growth of the characters as a direct result of the plot was expertly handled. You have three misfits working in close quarters for months, and shit's going to go down in their personal lives. Lucky for me, the romancey stuff was more or less glossed over in a line or two because ...

... the book was written entirely in an interview format, with a few news articles and logs mixed in. The interviews are conducted by a nameless government agent who is suspiciously Agent Coulsen. I started the book really disliking the continuous interview format, then I warmed up to it as I got a little more used to it, but ultimately it had a lot of limitations, as you'd imagine. Because they're spoken interviews, they're conducted after the event, which puts tremendous distance between the reader and the plot and characters. Everything is told, rather than shown, and because of this I wasn't able to get fully immersed in those past events being discussed. When they were bantering with the interviewer in the present, those were the best scenes because they were happening right now, and I felt like I was sitting with them as they conducted their interview. But when they talked about literally everything important to the main plot that had happened, I felt pulled out of the narrative, like I was a distant spectator. And I think this book suffered because of that. I didn't feel like I knew the characters as well as I should have because we only got dialogue. Can you imagine taking your favorite book and cutting all the narration, leaving in only dialogue? That's this book.

So being immersed and engaged with the characters is my main criticism of this book. It was good. Really good. Full of plot twists and really interesting military/political intrigues and conflicts. But the characters are where this book struggled. The only character I felt I really knew was Agent Coulsen, and I knew literally nothing about him - who he is, what's his name, what's his job. But the way he was characterized and spoke was such solid characterization. I mean, literally just imagine Agent Coulsen. Stern and straight-to-business, humorless except at rare moments when he lets some snide comment slip. He's manipulative to the extreme, but there are lines even he won't cross. Agent Coulsen was really the star of this book for me. I felt like I was reading his story, more than the actual protagonists, which... is odd. I really wish we got more from the characters. I felt like the two male characters had almost identical personalities, and I couldn't readily distinguish them as well as I would've liked.

One other issue I had, a minor one though, was that the whole mystery behind the robot was literally told to us in a big monologue. The magic of this book was the mystery behind the giant robot - where did it come from, who made it, and for what purpose? Once that was revealed (and it was a pretty lame story, I have to say...), I was left cheated, thinking, "That was it? Some ancient myth story?" It was just handed to us by a random deus ex machina character who conveniently showed up out of literally nowhere and imparted this crucial information. I didn't feel like the characters earned the information, which would've been much more satisfying. They were just handed it.

The prose was good. Smart. It felt natural and real most of the time, and Neuvel was able to slip in a lot of layering about concepts like do the ends justify the means? and how far are you willing to go? How many lives are you justified in sacrificing for this cause? Agent Coulsen had some tremendously interesting and entertaining dialogues with these heavy philosophical and moral dilemmas. He was completely ruthless and would screw a lot of people over, use blackmail and threats to get what he wants, but he was so smart! It was crazy entertaining watching this man get the upperhand on everyone, protagonists included, to the point of hilarity. I laughed out loud at some of the plots he'd set up to get his way. For example, he asked Kara if she has any vacation days, and she's like "I'm guessing I do, and you've already had me take leave." and Mr. Smug-butt was just like "Yeah, you've taken 22 days of vacation starting Saturday." It was just really funny how the characters started just expecting him to pull shit like this, and they're just exasperated but go along with it anyway. It was great. Coulsen is ... it's hard to call him evil or an antagonist, because you see all his motives, and they make sense from his perspective. He's not a bad person. He's got unconventional ways of getting things done, but he gets things done.

Anyway, this was a quick and easy read, and it had some great moments. The plot was perfect, but the characters fell flat and felt underdeveloped due to the limitations of the interview format this book was written in. Agent Coulsen was the shining gem in terms of characters, and he always put a smile on my face. Giant ancient robot, science, military, politics, romance...? or anti-romance almost lol. If you aren't a romantic like me, you'll actually appreciate the romantic subplot because things fall to complete shit in the middle of the book and made me go O__O ahahaaha I can't believe he did that! WTF! This book is worth the read for more low-key sci-fi fans.

4/5 stars