bookwookiee

Fat Charlie Nancy is as average as average gets and he is perfectly content with his average life. When he returns home for his father’s funeral, however, he sets in motion a chain of events that throws his life into chaos. He discovers that his father was the trickster god Anansi and that he has a highly unreliable, unstable, and potentially dangerous brother - Spider - who inherited all of the good stuff. In short order, Fat Charlie’s life is in shambles and he finds himself on a dangerous mission to save Spider and protect the Anansi bloodline.

Neil Gaiman has a knack for writing books that are hard to pin down. True to form, Anansi Boys is an enjoyable read that does not commit itself firmly to one genre. He combines elements of myth, fantasy, urban fantasy, folklore, and adventure. He taps a broad range of human emotion, sometimes within a single scene, and does so with apparent ease. He sometimes loses his thread and transitions clunkily between Charlie’s story and Anansi folktales, but all in all this is an engrossing story.