I had a blast reading Sleeping Giants last year, and despite some issues with the format, I enjoyed Neuvel’s original take on the alien invasion story. If you haven’t read Sleeping Giants, the story revolves around Dr. Rose Franklin, who finds a giant robot hand as a girl, and later becomes a renowned scientist who discovers that the hand is one piece of a very large alien robot. Sleeping Giants tackles the tale of how Rose and her crew are able to locate all the pieces of Themis, which just happen to be scattered all over the world, and put them back together again. Once that’s accomplished, the characters try to figure out the purpose of Themis—why she’s here and what she does. Now in the second book of the series, Neuvel takes the exciting premise of the first book and injects it with a shot of adrenaline, raises the stakes and gives us a terrifying look at what an alien invasion might be like. If I was intrigued by all the science and alien engineering in the first book, I was scared out of my mind this time around. This is no E.T., it’s more like War of the Worlds,…

Here’s a rundown of the books we think you should look out for in coming in the week. See any that you are really looking forward to? Find any you had not heard of yet? Know of books we missed? We know we don’t have everything and would love to hear what you feel we may have overlooked.   FANTASY          SCIENCE FICTION           HORROR   FANTASY                       SCIENCE FICTION       HORROR       FANTASY           SCIENCE FICTION           HORROR    

Here’s a rundown of the books we think you should look out for in coming in the week. See any that you are really looking forward to? Find any you had not heard of yet? Know of books we missed? We know we don’t have everything and would love to hear what you feel we may have overlooked.   FANTASY          URBAN FANTASY           SCIENCE FICTION           HORROR   FANTASY   URBAN FANTASY   SCIENCE FICTION     HORROR     FANTASY          URBAN FANTASY           SCIENCE FICTION           HORROR   Sleeping Giants Sylvain Neuvel 4/26/2016 In Shining Armor Elliott James 4/26/2016 Sharp Ends Joe Abercrombie 4/26/2016 HEX Thomas Olde Heuvelt 4/26/2016 The Days of Tao Wesley Chu 4/30/2016

The concept behind Sleeping Giants is amazing. I also love epistolary novels. But all the same, I wavered for days after finishing this book, pondering how I should phrase my review. On the one hand, I had a fantastic time reading it, a fact made even more obvious by the fact that I devoured all 300-ish pages in a little more than a day. Still, for all its wonderful themes and ideas, the novel is inherently flawed in several ways, and as much as I admired the format, I also thought it greatly limited the story in what it wanted to accomplish To call its premise awesome and unique though, is a huge understatement. Say what you will about Sleeping Giants, but you can’t deny the insane amount of thought and imagination that went into it. The mystery presented by its opening chapter is irresistible by itself, beginning with something as innocuous as a young girl riding her new bike near the woods in her home town of Deadwood, South Dakota. One moment, Rose Franklin is having a great time pedaling through the forest, and the next, she’s falling into a large square hole in the ground that wasn’t there…