Thursday, January 17, 2019

American Gods (American Gods #1) by Neil Gaiman

🌟🌟🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she's been killed in a terrible accident.

Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible.

He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same…

American Gods is a unique, well written novel depicting how much importance society puts on things like media, sex, and religion. It seems to symbolize how the focus has shifted from religion to more worldly ideals. I thought that these ideals were interesting but not enough to keep me invested in the book. 

The book starts off well enough but it soon becomes difficult to understand the direction that the author is going with it. I kept asking myself when Neil Gaiman was going to get to the point rather than continuing to add new information to sift through. I felt like I was on a ride that keeps going in circles rather than having thrilling twists and turns and an eventual end to it. I grew tired of the book by page 200 and then only read until the end because I had already invested so much time into reading it. I also began watching the TV show and didn't want to be confused by anything that happens in it. 

I think that the author was trying to put readers in Shadow's place by having us be just as confused and out of the loop as he was. It was frustrating enough to have to cope with being confused and unsure of where the story was going. Neil Gaiman adds another element of confusion by having side stories of other characters from the present and past that I don't feel added anything to the story at all. It seems like all the side stories added was more of a sexual component to the book. I'm not a prude or anything but all of the sexual scenes felt odd and made me somewhat uncomfortable. I know that the Gods were supposedly very sexual beings but enough is enough! Each of the side stories distracted from the main story and only served to confuse and stall the story as a whole. 

I was really disappointed by American Gods because I thought that I was going to love it because it seemed to have all of the elements that I enjoy in a story. It was unique, had interesting characters, included gods, and was written by an author that is known world wide. I felt that I had to give the book three stars for some of those reasons alone not to mention that the writing is well done. 




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