Title: Anansi Boys
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Nudity, death of parents, hospitals, blood, kidnapping, guns, police/being arrested, heterosexual sex (implied), rape by deception
Back Cover:
God is dead. Meet the kids.
Fat Charlie Nancy’s normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn’t know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother.
Now brother Spider’s on his doorstep — about to make Fat Charlie’s life more interesting… and a lot more dangerous.
Review:
The StoryGraph lists this book as “American Gods #2,” but the only thing it really has in common with American Gods is the idea that gods live among people and the god Anansi, who shows up briefly in American Gods and is the father who drops dead at the beginning of Anansi Boys. That’s it.
Aside from Anansi/Mr. Nancy himself, there’s a whole new cast of characters – Fat Charlie, his newly-discovered brother Spider, Charlie’s fiance Rosie, Rosie’s mother, Charlie’s boss Grahame Coats, Daisy who gets involved purely by accident, and a few others with supporting roles who only show up briefly.
Before I go too much farther, this series of texts I sent to my husband pretty much sums up my experience reading this book.
Anansi Boys: Don’t like the main character as much as I liked Shadow, but it’s still pretty good
Towards the beginning, about an hour in
Anansi Boys update: I hate all these characters
Somewhere in the middle
Probably going to finish Anansi Boys after all, there’s finally something interesting
About 70% in
Not nearly as good as American Gods
After finishing it
Shadow in American Gods wasn’t really a fully fleshed-out character, but more of an audience surrogate that we could follow around through the world. The characters in Anansi Boys are a lot more fleshed out, and I disliked every single one of them.
- Charlie was spineless, ambitionless, and upset that things in his life are going badly while at the same time doing next to nothing about them. You could probably find his picture in the dictionary next to the entry for “pusillanimous.”
- Spider is an asshole. He’s an incredibly charming asshole, partly due to god-powers from being the son of a god, but he has no regard for other people’s feelings. Not really in the sense that he enjoys hurting people, but more in that he’ll take what he wants and it won’t even cross his mind that other people might have feelings about it.
- Rosie is a do-gooder in the most derogatory sense, the kind of person who wants to feel like she’s helping people but she does the deciding about what helps and if it actually makes your situation worse, too bad, she thinks she did good and she’s very proud of herself about it.
- Rosie’s mother is every evil mother-in-law and controlling mother stereotype and actually supposed to be unlikeable, so I don’t feel too bad about disliking her.
- Grahame Coats is a slimy weasel of a financial advisor and he’s supposed to be unlikeable too.
To be fair, “I hate all these characters” was not entirely accurate. I didn’t hate Daisy, but she wasn’t in enough of the book for me to particularly like her, either. And Charlie had some major character growth in the last 15% of the book and ended up being not so bad. Spider also got better in the last 15%. Before that, though, it was a struggle. Spider shows up on Charlie’s doorstep and decides he’s going to live with him for a while, they clash and Rosie gets caught in the crossfire, Spider screws up Charlie’s life, and about 60% through Charlie tries to find a magical way of throwing Spider out since non-magical ways weren’t working and that’s when things finally get going.
Women in general really get the short end of the stick in this book. There are some old ladies Charlie knew growing up who know things that might help but aren’t telling him because reasons, there’s Rosie’s mother the horrid old crone, there’s Rosie herself (who I’ll talk about in just a second), and there’s Daisy whose main role seems to be “Charlie’s happy ending needs a girl and this one is convenient.” Those are all the female characters in this book. The older women get some agency (even though it’s to either be withholding information for who-knows-why or being a horrible and miserable person), but the two younger women don’t. Rosie especially gets screwed over – Spider spends one day pretending to be Charlie, falls for Rosie, and uses his god powers to keep her thinking he’s Charlie so he can keep having a relationship with her. There is absolutely rape by deception in this book, even though none of the characters seem to notice or care.
There are a few twists towards the end, and as I’d expect from Neil Gaiman they are pretty good. But they don’t cover over the multitude of things I dislike in this book. I really only picked this up because A, my husband owned a copy, and B, I loved American Gods so much I was hoping for more. I did finish it, and the end was good, but I’m not really sure it was worth going through the beginning and the middle to get there.
Bluejay Reads 