Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: Perennial 
Release Date: September 2, 2003 
ISBN: 0-06-055812-1 
Awards:  
Format Reviewed: Trade PB 
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Genre: Fiction and Literature - Fantasy/Horror 
Reviewed: 2003
Reviewer: Kristin Johnson 
Reviewer Notes:  Reviewer Kristin Johnson is the author of Christmas Cookies Are For Giving, co-written with Mimi Cummins. Her third book, Ordinary Miracles: My Incredible Spiritual, Artistic and Scientific Journey, co-written with Sir Rupert A.L. Perrin, M.D., will be published in 2004.

American Gods
By Neil Gaiman 

     Anyone who is familiar with Neil Gaiman's ultra-literate Sandman series won't be surprised at the Beat-Poet-ish (Allen Ginsberg, perhaps) riffs, and the Biblical sweep of the Bhagavad-Gita soulful-meditation-on-truth Wagner-like operatic arias of prose in American Gods.

     To sum up the plot in two paltry paragraphs does the book an injustice. It is an apocalyptic fantasy pitting the old gods against the gods of the Digital Age. It is a tale of redemption (or is it?) for the Everyman hero, who is a "Shawshank Redemption" type of guy named Shadow, as well as for America. It takes us through many mythologies from Native American (Don't know Wisakedjak? You will!), Norse (The villain, Mr. Wednesday, is purportedly Wotan, as in Odin, a favorite in Gaiman's Sandman odysseys), Ancient Egyptian (Shadow gets his heart weighed against a feather), Hindi (Kali, the Indian Destroyer Goddess, is called Mama-ji), Eastern European, and modern pseudo-mythologies such as media, Internet and television (especially comic and chilling is a scene in which Lucy Ricardo tries to seduce Shadow from the television with the unlikely line "You ever wanted to see Lucy's tits?"). There's a minor plot stolen, with reverence, from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," a few "Men In Black" figures running around, and a tip of a black silk hat to "The Sixth Sense" when Shadow keeps seeing his dead wife Laura, who is one of the strongest female characters, dead or alive, you'll meet.

     And although you may be wondering at page 400 where it's going, just let yourself get lost in Gaiman's playful, emotional prose, say at around page 394 during the WAITING FOR GODOT type monologue delivered by Samantha Black Crow:

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not…Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels…"

     This is just a taste of eternity, of divinity, of hell, of heaven, of agony and ecstasy and human fallibility, all possessed by Neil Gaiman's American Gods.