SOJALS rating:

Mediocre (2/5)

I first read this on the 24th February 2021.

This is the first novel in the "Themis Files" trilogy.

Eleven-year-old Rose Franklin fell into a sinkhole in the woods behind her house. What she landed in at the bottom of that hole was surprising. It was a giant metal hand. Years later as an adult, Rose is driven to find the rest of this massive robot's body, its parts scattered across the globe. Slowly she and her associate retrieve the missing and when assembled, they have a 60m tall robot with a internal cabin designed to hold two almost-human pilots.

Actually the idea rather excited me. giant robots left buried thousands of years ago by some alien race

But the format of the novel in the form of excerpted segments of some imaginary repository of recordings did rather mess up the flow. However it was an interesting exercise that manage to maintain some tension and excitement.

But what annoyed me is that there was no apparent point to this excerpting. THere was no explanation of the numbering of the excerpts, no rationale provided to explain how they were collected or why they are presented in the order they appear. There's no questioning about it within the novel itself so it feels like a stylistic conceit with no bearing on the story itself. That just annoys me. But I carried on reading because it was still quite good.