Sleeping Giants

In the book, Sleeping Giants, authored by Sylvain Neuvel, one of the the leading characters, Rose Franklin falls in a hole and lands on a giant robot hand when she is 11 years old. 20 years later, she is a physicist working on discovering what the hand was or why she landed on it, nothing is resolved until Kara Resnik, an army pilot almost dies, while uncovering a metal thigh. Rose Franklin quickly puts a team together to search and rescue the rest of the body to find out the robot’s purpose. Throughout discovering the robot’s purposes, many people get injured and the rest of the team is faced with a difficult decision...should we continue or will there be more devastation? This science fiction book is focused on Kara and how she and Vincent
For example, “The helmet had fixed her. It probably detected an injury and proceeded to repair it. I can only hope that’s why it was so painful” (78). This is important because Kara had an eye injury for years, due to an accident, but one second in the helmet and it repaired the eye, quickly and efficiently. This is also important because it means that the aliens are smarter than humans, due to them building a helmet that can detect and correct injuries in a matter of seconds, but it also shows that their technology can also be harmful to humans because Kara became blind for a couple of hours after her interaction with the helmet. In another example, “you should know that the hatch that leads inside the torso opens about four and a half feet from the floor. It’s not that big of a jump, but you’d need to be about eight feet tall to close it from the inside, or to open it again” (74). This implies, the extraterrestrials would have to be at least eight feet tall to be able to control the robot with only one person, since humans are shorter both Ryan and Kara have to both pilot the robot. This also implies, Kara and Ryan would need to learn how to work unison as one person to be able to control the robot and if one of them got stuck in the robot they would have to wait until someone found
Sleeping Giants is an interesting read because it shows that we might be only a couple years away from discovering that aliens exist and learning about how to contact them. It was also an interesting and fun read because it keeps the reader guessing what happens next through foreshadowing, gives insight about Kara’s challenging personality, and the female robot represents an entire universe that is just waiting to be explored. There are many strengths in this novel, such as the different personalities showcased in the reports and interviews, Kara’s development throughout the whole book, and revealing the science behind the compounds they used to bring the different body parts to the surface of Earth after being hidden for so long. One major weakness in this book is the fact that it is written entirely out of reports and interviews, which makes for a refreshing new layout of a book, but also causes the plot to be more hard to follow and understand in some places, such as the Denver incident where Rose died, due to Vincent and Kara’s carelessness. One other major weaknesses in this book are that Ryan’s motive for hitting Vincent with a truck and almost killing him are unknown, other than jealousy because Ryan got replaced and Vincent started spending more time with Kara, but the