A Good Fantasy Week

[mneme]

I just finished (in about a day) Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. Excellent stuff -- it starts off closer to gringo magical realism, but it's fantasy by the end of it.

I'm next going to read Patricia McKillip's latest -- Od Magic. I don't know anything about it, but suspect I'll love it.

And on top of that, Amazon just shipped In the Coils of the Snake, which I'm pretty sure is the latest Hollow Kingdom book. The Hollow Kingdom is an excellent novel (which won Mythopeoic, and which I reviewed in a spoilery review for Mythprint), and it's sequels are quite good as well; I'm curious to see how this one comes out.

But Od Magic first. And read Anansi Boys -- it's exellent; wonderful and warm and solid (and fwiw, much, well, -nicer- than American Gods).

Comments

[mneme]

And a bare 2 hours after Amazon emailed me to say that In the Coils of the Snake was in the mail, it arrived on my desk at work. Wierd.

[akawil]

I thought Anansi Boys felt like the closest to the style of Sandman of any of Gaiman's novels so far.

Which is good, because I really liked Sandman.

Gringo Magical Realism

[braz-king.livejournal.com]

Okay, that's a new one on me! I love it. :) I'm a huge Gabriel Garcia Maquez fan so this made me chuckle.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Odd. I didn't like Anansi Boys as much as American Gods. It was very good, but it didn't grab me the same way. Thinking about it, I'd say I liked two things less. The characters weren't as complex; they were more predictable. And there wasn't as good a sense of location. I'm not putting that well. Let's see... American Gods took place in America, with a capital 'A' (All right, "America" always has a capital 'A,' but you know what I mean. I'd put it in all caps if I didn't dislike shouting.), while Anansi Boys took place in a suburb, an office, a rich man's house, and so on. I knew the places in Anansi Boys because I'd been to them; I knew the places in American Gods even though I hadn't.