Book Review: Waking Gods

[Joey Stark]

Book Title: Waking Gods
Author: Sylvain Neuvel
Series: The Themis Files (#2)
Genre: Sci-fi

Waking gods was a great, fast-faced, exciting sequel that has ramped this sci-fi series up considerably!

This is the second book in the Themis Files trilogy, sequel to 'Waking Gods'. It continues on from the last book. An oddball team of scientists, academics and military pilots (along with a mysterious, anonymous interviewer) work together to solve the mystery of Themis, a gigantic robot whose body parts were discovered scattered across the globe. The discovery is of advanced technology but dates back to pre-civilisation. Now they've solved the questions of 'what is Themis?' and 'how do we work her?, in this book they move on to 'why was she left here?' and 'what should be done with her?

The story carried on wonderfully, even with a bit of a time skip and I was happy to see the return of my favourite characters from the first book, primarily the interviewer and one of the pilots, Kara. This book is much faster-paced than its predecessor, which was enjoyable and its somewhat unusual style of interviews and logs vs. narration seemed to flow better - but this might just have been me getting used to it. There's a lot of action, some humour, a lot of tragic moments in this one and a deepened plot. Overall, I really enjoyed it and add it to my list of sequels that surpass the first installation.

The thing that worries me is the amount of questions about the mysterious premise that these two books answer. By the end of Waking Gods, I felt like I knew everything. Even though it was left on a cliffhanger, I wonder if there will be that same sense of mystery moving forwards.