American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

I have to say I was kind of disappointed in this book. I'm not even entirely sure why. I think because it felt like it was a lot longer than it should have been. We follow Shadow for awhile and then Shadow follows Wednesday and gets wrapped up in all this weird stuff and I wasn't entirely sure why he just went along with it. The story didn't begin any earlier than it really needed to, which is good. Even though it felt like it started kind of slow, everything that we learn at the beginning came into play in an important way later on. There was really nothing unnecessary there.

I did like Shadow (I think. I'm not sure you could come up with a more ambivalent character if you tried) and characters like Wednesday were certainly fun to read about, but there were large portions of the book that didn't feel like they were going anywhere.

I can understand feeling numb after your wife and friend die, but I still had a hard time figuring out why Shadow followed Wednesday so faithfully. Not that he necessarily trusted Wednesday, per se, but that all these weird things kept happening around them and Shadow was completely unfazed by it. I probably would have drawn the line after I had been kidnapped and beaten, but no, Shadow just goes right back to work. Huh?

Then he spent some time at a funeral home before getting moved to a small town in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin. It wasn't until after that that the plot finally started to really get moving, but I spent all of that time thinking, "OK, but why am I reading this? Where is this going?" It did become relevant later, but I spent all that time wondering why Shadow was being sent hither and thither, never to stay in one place for long. At some point, it seemed like Gaiman was just trying to cover as many gods from as many different cultures as he could into one book and some of the mini-adventures felt like little more than excuses to do that.

The book made it pretty clear from early on that there was going to be a big battle. So I got all psyched for the big battle and then it never happened. Don't get me wrong, the reveal of the con was pretty cool, and I'm glad that Shadow stopped the bad guys, but it still felt kind of anti-climactic when all the gods just gave up and went home instead of tearing each other to shreds.