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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A fabulous novel exploring where the gods of mythology have gone. (  ) cavylovers | Jan 3, 2010 |  I absolutely love this book. It was recommended to me by someone who also absolutely loves the book, and I have continued to recommend it to others who will probably love the book. I'm a big fan of Gaiman's writing style (as evidenced by the number of his books that I now own), and the inclusion of gods from a wide variety of world religions was thrilling for someone who has always enjoyed mythologies from all over the world. ( ) rivetkitten | Dec 27, 2009 | This book is epic, suspenseful, sometimes humorous, and also happens to contain a scene that is quite possibly the most disturbing to attempt to visualize that I have ever read in my life. It also has prose that I want to find a way to crawl inside of, whatever it happens to be describing. A must read for everybody who isn't terminally allergic to the fantastic in their fiction, or possibly overly squeamish. (  )1  EstelleChauvelin | Dec 21, 2009 | Not my genre but wow, am I glad I read this. Amazing plotting and character development. I would have loved to take this apart with someone who has a better grounding in mythology than I do. A possible re-read. ( ) dlgoldie | Dec 21, 2009 | Old gods versus new gods, Shadow, ex-con is go- between. Don't remember plot, even after skimming again. (  ) mikent | Dec 11, 2009 | 
 This might all sound like a bit much. But Gaiman -- who is best known as the creator of the respected DC Comics ''Sandman'' series -- has a deft hand with the mythologies he tinkers with here; even better, he's a fine, droll storyteller.
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| Book description |
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Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.
Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.
More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:39:30 -0500)
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