American Gods - Book Review

 "what came first, gods, or the people who believe in them?"

-Wednesday 

neil gaiman expertly and prosaically addressed this special chicken-and-egg question in his best-seller. i've read all of rick riordan all my school life, and only now know the difference between books for teens and those for adult readers.

it's not about why people believe in the supernatural, that's a topic Neil doesn't delve into, maybe because it's controversial, or maybe it's a topic that deserves something more substantial than a novel. rather, he delves into the factual aspects of religion, and focuses into the dawn of a new age, beginning with the migration of many major and minor religious beliefs through the minds of people from all lands and tribes and faiths into a New Land, a land initially devoid of anthropomorphic diversity, but a land brimming with potential; he creates a mystical background, one where They walk among us, as humans, as much of flesh and blood as us mortals, and have inadvertently fallen into ruin, as the tenacity of their life-force, which is sustained by faith, by memory, by preservation not in the material, but in the collective consciousness, happens to belong to humans, ridiculously fickle-minded creatures who just happen to go with the flow of time and forget old gods to accommodate new ones they seem to make every winter. 

i loved the character dynamics, the twists and turns, never knowing where things were going. all holy pantheons combining together made quite an impression on me as a person who has rarely associated all pantheons on the same page. the ending was, as all quasi-perfect works have, the cherry on top. 

loved the weeks i spent, slowly reading the quite long book, during my recesses, which are infrequent owing to academic and competitive pressure, but i'm glad to goodness i stuck till the end.