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An 11 year old girl named Rose rides her bike into the woods near her home when suddenly she falls into a large crater. She isn’t hurt, but she is sitting inside a 23 foot long metal hand! However; it isn’t a statue. It’s an extremely detailed, complex piece of machinery that just doesn’t quite seem right.
About twenty years later, Rose is now a scientist and as fate would have it, in charge of studying this mysterious artifact. It’s made of metals it shouldn’t be made of, it glows with turquoise lights despite no light or power source, and it weighs significantly less than it should. Everything about this hand is off, and suggests it is not man-made. A breakthrough is made when they discover a way to “activate� the other pieces and a global (and illegal) search is on the way. Slowly they rebuild this giant robot, and the more the secrets they uncover, the more mystery and questions they uncover.

At first I thought the format would leave me uninterested or detached, I was wrong. I think it would have been just fine written in standard novel narrative, but this worked too. It is told through a series of interview transcripts, journal entries and other documents. The interviews are all between the main characters and a mysterious, unnamed government agent who acts as a sort of “Men In Black, so high on the Top Secret Clearance level that he probably doesn’t legally exist� kind of person.
The book reminds me a lot of the movie Arrival (which I know is based on a book but I didn’t read it, so all I know is the movie), in that it tackles a very realistic approach to what happens when an alien artifact is found. The way the scientists decipher the language and code written on the walls of the crater and on the robot itself are very clever and I believe would be a very real way to go about it.
As far as sci-fi goes, it is certainly more on the drama, intellectual side (like Arrival or Interstellar) rather than action side. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will definitely read the next in the series.