Review for American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I think I've been living under a rock or just talking to the wrong people, because I'd never heard of American Gods until the day it popped up on my Kindle Daily Deal page.  I read the sample and figured, what the heck, even if I hate it I'll still only be out a couple bucks.  So I bought it and it sat on my Kindle for weeks until I finally found the time to sit and read.  And I'm glad I did.  I really did enjoy the book...even if it did ramble a bit and descended into madness a time or three.  I'm still not sure if it added to the story or detracted.

Shadow is our guide through a tricky landscape of the Gods, old and new, in America.  Shadow meets the mysterious Mr. Wednesday after being let out of prison after a nearly three year stint for beating the snot out of a few people who wronged him.  He was looking forward to going back home to his wife only to be told that she was killed, along with his best friend, in a horrible car accident.  He meets Wednesday on the plane home where he is offered a job as his errand boy.  Shadow hesitantly accepts and is thrown into a world that challenges your beliefs.

Minor spoiler here...Wednesday is actually Odin, the Allfather.  Big, bad ruler of Asgard.  He's now shuffling around 20th century America and has all but lost his bad-assness.  The premise is that the Gods gain their power from belief.  The more people believe in them, the stronger that they become.  But when people stop believing, they become weak and vulnerable and many of them simply cease to be.  There are new Gods taking over.  Media, Internet, Electricity, Money, Television, etc.  The old Gods are dying out.  No one worships Ra, Bast, Odin, Thor, Loki, Gaia, Coyote, Papa Legba, etc anymore.

There will be a battle, a war, between the old and the new for their survival and their hand hold in America.

There are a lot of characters to try and keep straight and at times it's easy to lose track of who is who and where you are either in reality or somewhere in between.  I think the only real problem with the entire book was the fact that there were so many characters that some of them really fell between the cracks.  And I was a little disappointed by the ending.  With all the build up that went on throughout the book it left me wanting more.  There were still some twists and some surprises that left me smiling or shaking my head.

All in all, this was a great book.  I can definitely see myself going back and reading it again.  But then I'm kind of a junkie when it comes to the old gods.  I was definitely born several centuries too late!