Book 3.5: American Gods

Author: Neil Gaiman
Dates read: August 4, 2011 - August 20, 2011 (17 days)
Pages: 461
Genre: Fiction, fantasy

I ended up a couple weeks behind schedule with this book, again wishing I wasn’t quite so busy so I would’ve been able to get through it more quickly. I picked this book because I’ve read a handful of things by Neil Gaiman but somehow never this particular novel, which seems to be one of his most well loved.

The book follows a newly released convict named Shadow as he comes to terms with the news that his wife died days before his release. Feeling he has nothing particular to live for without her, he takes an odd job with a mysterious man who identifies himself as Wednesday. As Wednesday travels the country with Shadow visiting various acquaintances and rallying their support for an upcoming war of some kind, Shadow slowly realizes he’s in the employ of a fading god. With so few people in America truly believing in the old religions that originally brought various gods to the country in the first place, they have little choice but to stand off against the new gods of technology if they hope to stay alive. But Shadow also slowly realizes that Wednesday’s motivations aren’t entirely what they seem, and his own role in the conflict is much larger than Wednesday initially led him to believe.

I really liked the concept behind this book, but at times found the narrative a little too meandering for my tastes. Of course I realize that to encompass all the aspects a tale like this demands, there needs to be a lot of give and take in the plot, but I found myself often more entertained by the small vignettes about people and gods from times past than I was by Shadow’s storyline in the present. Perhaps it wasn’t that the story was too meandering for me (since I’m generally more drawn to things with complicated, vast narratives than I am to simpler, more linear tales), but that I found myself thinking a good amount of the time that Shadow’s part in everything wasn’t the most interesting thing happening in the world of the story. At many moments in the book when I was following Shadow, I’d rather have had a window into the events and characters elsewhere. That being said, the concept at the heart of the book is so compelling that I’d still recommend it even though I thought some of the passages were notably slow. And even though I saw the twists of the last few chapters coming, I was still very entertained by them, probably mostly because they left me thinking, “Yes, of course this is how things resolve. There’s no other way this story could have ended.”