Over vacation I was able to read Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, perhaps my favorite current author. First thing first, a brief summary (borrowed from Amazon.com)

Summary

If readers found the Sandman series creator’s last novel, American Gods, hard to classify, they will be equally nonplussed—and equally entertained—by this brilliant mingling of the mundane and the fantastic. “Fat Charlie” Nancy leads a life of comfortable workaholism in London, with a stressful agenting job he doesn’t much like, and a pleasant fiancée, Rosie. When Charlie learns of the death of his estranged father in Florida, he attends the funeral and learns two facts that turn his well-ordered existence upside-down: that his father was a human form of Anansi, the African trickster god, and that he has a brother, Spider, who has inherited some of their father’s godlike abilities. Spider comes to visit Charlie and gets him fired from his job, steals his fiancée, and is instrumental in having him arrested for embezzlement and suspected of murder. When Charlie resorts to magic to get rid of Spider, who’s selfish and unthinking rather than evil, things begin to go very badly for just about everyone.

Review

First, as stated above, I am a Gaiman fan. I enjoy his prose, plot and characters and afind his dark humor a nice addition. This book has all of those things but still has something “missing”; and that is not really putting it well. Perhaps because this returns us to a similar world of American Gods there is no “learning” about the world verses Neverwhere or American Gods, or Coraline for that matter. I did enjoy the book - quite a bit as a matter of fact. It felt like a cross between Neverwhere and American Gods with a littel bit of Dave Barry’s Big Trouble thrown in - really. Maybe that is because of the ending where everyone ends up in the right places at the right times.

I think this is the weakest of all of Gaiman’s books, but that is not to say it is a bad book, not even close. I just hold Neverwhere (especially) and Amercian Gods in very high esteem, and Stardust and Coraline are refreshing genre and age defiers. Neil has a new collection of short fiction coming out in October 2006 called Fragile Things so I look forward to getting into that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 11:14 am and is filed under Books.