Anansi Boys

For me, the class discussion on this novel quite greatly expanded my knowledge on the work itself. Even more so than the other class discussions on other novels we've read, and for a few reasons. Mainly I did not realize the novel's story was based on a form of African beliefs/religion. I will say right now that I have no cultural knowledge on any of these specifics, so I may sound unfamiliar with what I am talking about. I simply thought the premise and god-like characters were just a fantasy element that author Neil Gaiman thought up for the sake of the novel. And as with others, I did not realize that the characters were of African descent. I would have most likely read through the entire novel without ever knowing, just assuming every character was white. It was not until the in class discussion that I found out otherwise, which was somewhat of a suprise. After the class discussion however I felt as though I would have preferred reading American Gods instead of Anansi Boys. From what I heard it seemed like the type of novel that I would have found more interesting, wheras Anansi Boys wasn't all to my taste with the African animal-type god characters. What I mean is the characters themselves somewhat disinterested me. I like animal-type characters, but the characters in Anansi Boys were somewhat uninspired in the way of their divinity, I should say? Well, for example, I was turned off from the novel when the character Spider essentially shapeshifted or magically disguised himself as Charlie. To me that's just a little on the cheesy side of things. The novel went more and more down this road as it went on and to me it was hard to focus because it really stretched my believability.