American Gods

This book was a kind of a disappointment to me, meaning, it was not as good as I thought it was. For many years I've heard wonders about this book and how it was amazing. It was on my “to-read” for at least a couple of years and I purchased because of a Kindle deal, and last month I decided to give it a try.

Well, I think the book starts pretty well, telling us about the situation of Shadow, his time in jail and how he is mysteriously released from prison one day earlier than expected. I enjoyed that first part of the book up until how Shadow met Wednesday. Then, many parallel stories start to come up in the middle of the narrative, Shadow's errands becomes uninteresting, and for me the road trip became quite boring from the middle of the book forward.

There are many references of American culture, religion, ancient and modern mythology from around the globe, which is inherently interesting, but the way all these elements were put together in the story didn't work very well, in my opinion.

I read the 2011 version (tenth anniversary edition), that one with additional 12,000 words, and maybe that was one of the reasons I thought there were whole chapters of the book that seemed not be essential to the story. So the rhythm of the story is irregular, there were great chapters and then a couple ones that simply dragged and I couldn't wait for the narrative to get back on track.

All in all, the premise of the book is great, I enjoyed the “weird fantasy” aspect of the story, but for me it was not executed very well.