As a Neil Gaiman fan, I had been waiting forever to find this book and read it. I like his style, his sense of humor, and tone, so I was expecting something similar to Neverwhere, which is one of my all-time favorite books.
So what the heck happened with this novel???
Let me give some backstory: This dude named Shadow gets out of prison early because his wife dies in a car accident. Then he meets this person named Mr. Wednesday, who we find out later is actually Odin in disguise, and Shadow agrees to work for him. Wednesday admits that America is becoming a bad place for gods because new gods that reflect things like TV and drugs have popped up and are replacing the old ones. They have to stop them before the old gods are destroyed.
There are a lot of things that bothered me with this book, the biggest problem being the character of Shadow. The dude has the personality of a brick. Literally, he doesn't react badly to anything that happens to him or ever question why he's meeting certain weird people or how his wife should be dead instead of walking around following him like she's alive. He just goes with whatever comes along, and to me that just isn't very realistic for a human character.
I could not get over how the book kept getting distracted by other subplots, and by the time it returned to the main conflict, the reader barely remembers what significance the main conflict has. Is it really necessary to detail what Shadow ordered for dinner at a rest stop, how long it took him to eat it, and what kind of small talk he had with a terribly insignificant character? Gaiman, I love you, but reading parts like that make me wonder if you were on your way to becoming more of a Stephen King in the earlier days.
So after a bunch of other stuff happens and a bunch of characters are introduced and more are killed and the old gods all FINALLY get together and want to fight the new gods but Shadow manages to stop them before the fight happens. That was majorly disappointing because I hate it when books build up a giant, epic battle and then just decides to back out of it (Breaking Dawn) or have a character bring it to a stop; like, for instance, in Good Omens, another Gaiman book.
Basically, the book leaves more questions than answers and leaves you to wonder why some things are even included when they clearly don't serve a purpose to the plot. Why does Gaiman choose to focus on the more well-known gods of mythology instead of obscure ones, like Iduna or Britomartis, that would make the story a little more unpredictable? Why even put so much significance on Odin while barely mentioning people such as Jesus, who would most likely be the subject of conversation on multiple occasions considering that the story takes place in America? (Though, to be fair, Gaiman did include a conversation between Jesus and Shadow in the back of the book that I thought was interesting.) And how is it that everyone just listens to Shadow when he convinces them not to fight? It's not like they are thousands of years older than him or anything!
In conclusion, I lost interest somewhere right past the middle of the book and ended up going on wikipedia to see how it ended. I really don't like writing lukewarm or bad reviews for books because I understand that writing is hard and it is even tougher to finish a complete novel. I do not believe this is Gaiman's best work, but an indication that he had truly amazing, slightly more cohesive novels on the way. I strongly recommend reading his other works.
Rating: 6/10
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