So many people have reviewed this, I slipped through a few to see that I would likely be writing the same review.
I IMPLORE YOU I do not mean ANY offense to any religion in this review. I give everyone the right to revere, worship, and give praise to whatever you will and will not.
I am only one woman.
However, since this book is written by an immigrant to America, I can only offer my story and how this story related so comfortably to me. Literately comforting me.... showing me how starkly new "America" was, yet the concepts that kept the people of my ancestries of both parents driving throughout history, are alive and thriving in this land.
Neil Gaiman is an elegant, yet unpretentious writer, and in that own right, I love his work. He came from London to America and wrote the Great American Novel as a road trip, using long forgotten histories that aren't taught in American grade school of who came to America when.... and how no matter what, wherever you came from, as long as you told the stories of your "Gods", you brought them with you and connected them to this land.
Personal Note
My father was Filipino, born in Nasagbu. He came to Maryland to finish his internship in medicine before moving to New York. He came here with all the beliefs that come with the Philippines that only after I was old enough to go there and understand the differentness of even something as common as "Catholicism" in the Philippines is entirely different than it was as a child in Glendale, Arizona as a little girl.
I saw baby Jesus dolls held in the hands of teenage girls who would rock the large wooden base in her hands as it turned to answer psychic type questions of yes and no. I remember seeing through a cracked open door, my dad allowing the inhabitants of this strange apartment hold a wooden "Arm of Jesus" over his heart in hopes to heal him. Keep in my mind, until that moment, I've only known my father to be an American doctor. A scientist.... a man who knew the difference between fact and fiction.
This was not fiction to him.
When as a child, most of my friends were taught not to fear ghosts. Me? I was taught I'd better damn well fear them. And believe me I did, and still do this day.
Neil Gaiman's American Gods was a comforting piece. My father died in 1991. All that's left are the stories he told me and my friends. Some were funny. Some were scary. Regardless, they stuck. And they, in their own way, formed their own sort of religion. One where I believe my father went back to his homeland after his death.
Do I believe my father was a god? Of course, not. I believe that he knew that his God had not left him.
Ultimately, in American Gods everything is a process and it happens over and over. When you find your place in the process, the world feels ultimately more tolerable. After all the humiliation suffered by Americans in these past few years, we can look through the sky and find our pride. It's American pride, yet no one is American, not originally.
Shadow is a man with a past and wants nothing more now than to live a quiet life with his wife. When his wife is killed in a terrible accident, Shadow...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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