Neil Gaiman’s « American Gods » is the kind of books that are hard to summarize or write a review about. This book is so many stories in one whole epic, there are several subplots and characters and details, it’s a very intricate construction that cannot be easily condensed into one clear idea. So here are some scraps about it: It’s about Gods, but not your regular mainstream Gods, it’s about faith and the evolution and devolution of religions. Gods that were created by Man and are abandoned by him, they were left thirsty for believers and worshippers and found themselves in the back alley of the pantheon of the big Gods. It’s also about New Gods, that rise as fast as they fall. It’s about a war to prove who is more relevant than the other. It’s about Shadow, a man who just walked out of jail, learned about the death of his wife, and finds himself caught in a game with rules he doesn’t master well, yet he goes with the flow of the craziness he encounters. It’s also about coin tricks, Shadow’s hobby, in fact this whole book is a coin trick. You know it’s a trick, the coin doesn’t disappear for real, you know there is some kind of subversion, you try to watch closely to discover how it’s done, but you end up being baffled and surprised with the result. I kept reading, followed all the clues, got all the details, thought I knew how this is done, what it’s about, but in the end, I found out that I was looking in the wrong way, Neil Gaiman was weaving a much bigger intrigue than the one I imagined. This is a highly entertaining book, it didn’t bore me for one second, every word in this book is there for a reason, there are no superfluous details or subplots. Keep your mind wide awake when reading it, also get ready to play a game of “Guess who is this god?” and have your mythologies knowledge tested.