Review: For three years Shadow has been biding his time in prison and waiting for the day when he can return home to the woman of his dreams, his wife Laura. Prison has neither broken him nor enlightened him, but it has taught him coin tricks. He has continued to maintain the same modicum of behavior: thoughtful, patient, observant. He moves through prison with minimal entropy, and although his sentence was six years, good behavior has gotten him three. But days before he gets out the warden calls him into his office, and Shadow finds out his wife was killed in a car accident. The world he knows crumbles beneath his feet.

As he tries to make his way home, a series of small mishaps leaves him on a plane with a man named Wednesday, a man who knows his name, a man who knows his wife died, a man who offers him a job. Shadow makes futile efforts to avoid this man, but Wednesday is like a bad penny; he always turns up. Without his wife to return to, Shadow needs to find something to hold onto. The more Wednesday talks, the more Shadow finds himself listening and latching onto what the man has to offer. Then the maelstrom begins.

Wednesday introduces Shadow to people who are never quite what they seem and who appear to step out of the pages of antiquity. The more they work together, the more Shadow becomes embroiled in something that he realizes is beyond him, a mortal, and better left to those with power, those who are gods.

Recommendation: Neil Gaiman works hard to embrace his readers into the mythology of the world. He touches on Norse, Irish, Native American, and Russian mythological figures (among many others). In an interesting twist, he moves these figures into American life as though they rode in the hulls of the first boats that came to American shores. Now they live here, feeding off the fading beliefs of the early inhabitants. He insinuates the gods into our daily lives: cab drivers, alcoholics, apartment tenants. Much of their mystique has faded, but it still lurks behind their shabby exteriors. America is slowly destroying them.

As the protagonist becomes more and more entangled with this previously unknown community, the book seems to lose its focus. The purposeful inclusion of mythology’s gods and goddesses forces its way to the forefront of the novel, and Shadow’s narrative falls to the wayside. As interesting as Wednesday and his colleagues are, the story of Shadow is the most engrossing. He spends a lot of time in a small town hiding from authorities who think he has killed members of their department. His good natured but taciturn personality makes him irrepressible, and it is not long before Shadow grows on the town and the town grows on him. It is here, amidst this society, that the book finds its groove.

The rest of the novel reads like a combination of horror and magical-realism as though the author can’t quite decide where he wants to take his novel. Due to this, the story swirls out of control. Shadow’s imposing presence is unable to anchor the novel, and much of it becomes overwhelming. The best part of the novel focuses on Shadow and a mystery in the small town where he hides. This story might have made for an interesting novel itself. The book struggles to right itself like a ship caught in a storm, and the reader must ride the tossing and turning until the very end.

Gaiman, Neil. American Gods, Hapertorch, New York, 2001.

Currently Reading: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

On Deck: Twenty Chickens For a Saddle by Robyn Scott