Review: American Gods
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
It’s sad to say, but this book just bored me. I usually like Neil Gaiman’s stories, so don’t read this as an attack on his talent or anything, but sometimes individual works just don’t connect.
In this case, American Gods felt aimless, detached, and more than a little pointless. Not only did the big concepts fail to land, but the little stuff as well. It’s one thing when you have a book like Neverwhere where a few of the characters are insanely quirky because it’s balanced out by the “straight man”. Unfortunately, Shadow is a terrible straight man. He doesn’t question, he doesn’t speak for the reader, he just follows along moving from story segment to story segment (note I don’t call them plot points as most everything in here is useless to the overall plot.)
Nope, it just didn’t work for me.