He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end. If you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.
I first discovered Neil Gaiman thanks to a friend and fellow writer who heard me moaning and groaning about how my YA book ideas didn’t fit into the mold of what was trendy right now.
“Read The Graveyard Book,” she told me. She told me nothing about it; I didn’t ask, just checked it out of the American Library in Paris. Ever since, I’ve been hooked, devouring everything Neil Gaiman has written that I can get my hands on: short stories, novels, anything. Good Omens has become one of my “feel-good” books, and this week, I devoured the 600-plus-page American Gods with the same fervor.
In this book, Gaiman focuses on his adoptive country, and through twists and turns manages to do exactly what I love so much in fantasy: shine a light on the real through a lens of the fantastic. Through the twists and turns of his elaborate but exquisitely thought-out plot, he manages to open the reader’s eyes with regards to religion and spirituality, yes, but also humanity and what it means to truly be alive.
Sometimes, you stumble upon a book at exactly the right moment in your life. This has happened to me maybe a dozen times… and it has happened again with American Gods.