This is “review” #6, and I still don’t know how to do this properly. I’m not really interested in giving a synopsis, but I guess there aren’t any rules, so once again, this is just kinda what I thought about this.
On Neil Gaiman’s amazon bio, he says, “I make things up and write them down.” Which is awesome. Obviously (?) he’s being a least a little disingenuous, but with this book it doesn’t seem too far off.
I believe this was his first novel, and that’s not surprising. It’s entertaining, and there’s a lot to recommend it, but this is not a book I’ll be revisiting; it’s not that compelling. Aside from the occasional “fuck” and the more-than-occasional pretty nasty violence and/or torture, it feels like a younger audience YA novel (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s funny, it’s pretty interesting, but I didn’t love it. The characters aren’t especially well-developed, and the really good ideas aren’t taken as far as they could be, and more than once I wondered why in the hell the story had taken a particular turn — not in the “Holy crap! Didn’t see that coming!” manner, but more, “That doesn’t even make sense.”
A number of questions could have been answered without making the book overly long, since there’s some extraneous stuff that just raises more “What the hell?”s without adding much to the story.
I still love Neil Gaiman, though.
