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I sensed early on that this book was only a 2-star "meh" of a novel. Shadow had all the character of a video game protagonist, and it took a painfully long time for the weird (yet not at all whimsical) "god stuff" to get interesting. Even by the time Wednesday was introduced and he and Shadow were cavorting around the U.S., I was just waiting for the story to kick in, for it to go somewhere. Wednesday is probably this novel's greatest achievement, because his presence alone is what kept me going. But then Gaimen lets other gods in to the story, and it all becomes a bit of a mess.

Some characters land well (Czernobog, Mr. Nancy), others less well (Mad Sweeney, the Egyptian gods), and many more are just pointless in their inclusion. Part of the fun of this book was seeing how Gaimen's imagination would manifest the world's gods in an American context, but in the end, his imagination and his writing just weren't up to the task. Churning through this book became a chore, and the brief moments of delight when Gaimen would conjure up the Americanization of a deity or imp or whatever became more and more rare; I was left with little more than a heavily-padded plot, allusions to Old World mythology that I couldn't really be bothered to look up to "get," a pastiche of beliefs and motifs and symbols and supernatural ephemera that added up to a whole heap of nothing. The story just wasn't good enough, or really, worth telling at all, without some better characters or a wilder imagination.

Also: no Jesus? No Yahweh? No Moses or Mohammed? Call it an impossible-t0-miss missed opportunity, call it intellectual cowardice by not going after gods people still believe in, but c'mon Gaiman! How can you write a book set in the land of the Puritans, the Mormons, the Baptists, the land of Bible-thumping, gospel-quoting slaveowners and NOT write about the Abrahamic religions?! Inexcusable, and quite a letdown.

If Gaimen wanted really wanted to write a book in any way about America, those are the only gods he need concern himself with, and in this book, he totally whiffed. I guess it's only safe to write about gods Disney would make a movie out of. I doubt there are any fundamentalist Norsemen or -women looking to beat up or kill Gaimen for his depiction of Odin.

On the plus side, I did like the digressive chapters in the book that told the "origin stories" of the various old gods in the New World. Those historical-fiction vignettes were the closest thing Gaimen wrote that made me feel like any of the Old Gods (or the New) were actually alive.

The problem with a book about gods, I guess, is that there's simply so many to choose from, but belief is in short supply. I didn't believe the nebulous "rules" the gods lived by, I didn't believe their deaths or their riddles, I didn't believe even Gaimen knew really who the "new gods" were or what they stood for, and in the end, I didn't believe Shadow needed to undertake this weird journey in the first place, or that gods (old or new) would even bother to show up to fight each other for ... who knows what?

In this novel Gaimen takes us to this strange land called America, and he tells us his stories about its weird gods, and what they do, and where they come from. And like visitors to foreign lands in centuries past, we can safely laugh at those stories, and discard them, because they're all a bunch of nonsense.