Imagine Ted Dekker’s Circle Series… Without The Christian Allegory. Now toss in perhaps a dose of Jeremy Robinson or Douglas Adams, and you pretty well know exactly what to expect with this particular book.
You’ve got the man who goes to sleep in one world… and wakes in another (Circle series). You’ve got pretty damn insane amounts of balls to the wall action with a lot of inventive scifi aspects all over the place (Robinson). You’ve got jokes ranging from so subtle you barely pick them up all the way up to slap the stick upside your head slapstick comedy. (Robinson and Adams). You’ve even got a version of one particular late 90s movie going on to an extent… but revealing *which* movie gets into spoiler territory I’ll not go into. Suffice it to say that the parallels here are as obvious as the Dekker ones, and anyone who has seen this movie should easily recognize them.
And yet, Weaver still manages to craft a compelling tale uniquely his own, one full of both action and heart and one that will make you ponder things you may have pondered before, but in newer ways.
Yes, at 600+ pages this is a tome – but it is a fun one that tells a complete story and doesn’t really feel repetitive or that any scene/ group of scenes could be left out and still tell the same story with the same depth, so I would thus argue that it is exactly the right length. Even if it *is* my longest read of the year so far, and even if Weaver *did* forget to warn me about its length before I picked it up. And even if the base apparently real science underpinning the entire book does sound like something out of Idiocracy. 😉
Seriously, this is easily one of the more inventive scifi books you’re going to read this year, so if you like the scifi genre at all, you really need to pick up this book. If you like action at all, you need to pick up this book. Truly one of the early standouts of 2025.
Very much recommended.
This review of Sleepwalker by Xander Weaver was originally written on February 25, 2025.
