American gods by Neil Gaiman

A book review

I am going to keep this as spoiler free as I can, but there are some things that are bound to come out. You have been warned. If you would like to read this book, then you would want to be surprised by the very intricate and complicated plot.

Okay.

The basic story of this book is that there are ancient gods, those brought in from other countries or older cultures in America, such as gods from Africa, Ireland, India, Egypt, Iceland, and many other European countries. These are at war with the modern gods, such as media and technology. This is almost like a road to discovery of the different gods that exist within the one country.

The principal characters of the story are Wednesday and Shadow. There are many others on the same side that you will need to read the book to find out who they all are and how they came to be in America. On the other side is a man named Mr World. There are so many twists and turns throughout this book it is very difficult to describe it. What I would say is that it is brilliant and extremely well-written. I love how some characters reappeared whenever the plot needed them.

My only complaint would be that so many well-defined characters completely disappeared from the plotline. It felt like they had more they could have put into the story than the short pieces they had. (Yes, for those that read it, I mean the Jin!)

The ending of the story is not something you could have predicted at the beginning, or even in the middle! It was exceptionally crafted and I think it would have left everybody surprised. However, I am sure there are very few people that would disagree with me and say all the clues were there. Maybe they were, but I just did not see the ending coming!

I really enjoyed the writing within this book. Neil Gaiman must have worked hard to conceive the idea and build it into the novel that it is. Yes, it is long, but then I like my books to be longer than usual. The characters were realistic and easy to imagine within your mind.

That gods exist because people believe in them was a very interesting concept, and I did like the idea that they travelled with the believers to the unknown country. The only God that was missing would be Jesus Christ, but they mention him a few times.

I would recommend this book to anybody likes the genre of fantasy or maybe even fairytales. (Not that I’m saying every God is a fairytale, just that I could describe this story as one). If you are a fan of Neil Gaiman’s work then you would enjoy this thoroughly. I would definitely recommend it, and I would give this a 7/10. (Markdown for the characters that only appeared for one scene). Well, I think I did well in not giving away any spoilers!