My first time around with this novel was as an audiobook. This time I am reading it.
Someone whose taste in books I generally admire told me that he was unable to “get” into American Gods when he started reading it a couple of years ago. He abandoned it less than halfway through. In listening to this version of it, I tried to make sense of how someone could reject any work by Gaiman, let alone this one. Yes, there are some flat spots in the prose, and a lot of names to keep track of, but . . .
The premise of the book: what happens to the gods of immigrants when they come to America? What happens when old beliefs die? Whence come new beliefs? is just too good to resist.
A writer in Gaiman's position–a foreigner living in the States somewhat permanently–is uniquely suited to tell Americans a bit about themselves. Things that we just take as they are can be transformed, through the eyes of a semi-detached observer–into something compelling, magical, poetic. That is worth our knowing and reading.
Another Goodreads reader indicated that this is the first of French's novels that didn't surpass the one before it in her estimation of its qualities. I'll differ with her a bit. Broken Harbour, with its odd pine martin creature story, never hooked me the way this did. Each of French's novels plays out tensions between the story line of the murder (who did it; how will we learn the facts?) and the story line of the Dublin murder squad detectives. Along the way, she weaves in juuuuust enough weird to make you sit up and take notice. I was a bit worried, at about the 1/3-through mark, that she'd lost me and we were back in weasel land, but her depiction of the all-girls' school and its pupils and the power–quite literally–of their friendships was just remarkable. She writes a good tale, that Tana French. Well done.
I understand that Godin wants to write short and sweet.
But this was a blog post that became a book.
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