Flight into Fantasy

In which I discover another author I should be ashamed for not reading sooner. And I’m still not pasting book covers in with these reviews because (1) You are reading a site hosted by a blind person and thus (2) I can’t be bothered to figure out how to make them look nice.

Anyway, on we go.

Title: American Gods
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: urban fantasy
Publication Date: April 30, 2002
Publisher: Harper Torch
Excerpt: here
Reason for Reading: Gaiman’s one of those authors that people tell me I should read all the time. I finally did.
Synopsis:

The storm was coming … Shadow spent three years in prison, keeping his head down, doing his time. All he wanted was to get back to the loving arms of his wife and to stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. But days before his scheduled release, he learns that his wife has been killed in an accident, and his world becomes a colder place. On the plane ride home to the funeral, Shadow meets a grizzled man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A self-styled grifter and rogue, Wednesday offers Shadow a job. And Shadow, a man with nothing to lose accepts. But working for the enigmatic Wednesday is not without its price, and Shadow soon learns that his role in Wednesday’s schemes will be far more dangerous than he ever could have imagined. Entangled in a world of secrets, he embarks on a wild road trip and encounters, among others, the murderous Czernobog, the impish Mr. Nancy, and the beautiful Easter-all of whom seem to know more about Shadow than he himself does. Shadow will learn that the past does not die, that everyone, including his late wife, had secrets, and that the stakes are higher than anyone could have imagined. All around them a storm of epic proportions threatens to break. Soon Shadow and Wednesday will be swept up into a conflict as old as humanity itself. For beneath the placid surface of everyday life a war is being fought-and the prize is the very soul of America. As unsettling as it is exhilarating, American Gods is a dark and kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an America at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. Magnificently told, this work of literary magic will haunt the reader far beyond the final page.

My Thoughts: I knew once I started this book that it was going to be the glorious kind of story that sucks me in and doesn’t let go until it’s played itself out. I absolutely love the opening lines.

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked don’t-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

How can you not read that and find it awesome? And it just gets better from there, as Shadow realizes, once he’s been released, that his wife Laura is dead. And that’s just the beginning. Soon, desperate and with nothing to lose, he hooks up with the grizzled, lecherous and utterly delightful Mr. Wednesday.

Nothing in this book quite goes the way I expected it to, and yet there is something marvelously epic in Shadow’s journey. He’s a compelling everyman character who grows into an extremely noble, even heroic man, all quite without realizing he’s done it.

The rest of the characters are well-written, too, and again, every time I figured Mr. Gaiman was going to do something in particular with any one of them, he surprised me by not taking the expected route. I came to care for a lot of the people Shadow met along the way, from the fascinating Mr. Wednesday to Czernabog to Shadow’s wife, Laura.

I won’t say much more about the plot, because I think it’s definitely something that needs to be experienced, but I will say that it all worked for me, and in the end, I realized I’d read one of those books that would stay with me for weeks to come.

Final Grade: An A- for something extremely original and captivating. I’ll definitely not be wasting any more time putting off reading Gaiman.