Looking for an adventure and action book? You’ll want to read this book, Anansi Boys (American Gods Book 2) in the Horror, Humor, Mystery, Romantic, filled with , Dragons, Ghosts, Gods & Goddesses characters you’ll grow loving as the story progress! It’s written by Neil Gaiman with 416 pages and published by William Morrow; Reprint edition (October 13, 2009). We hope you pick up this book, and please leave a comment!
Summary:
In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Neil Gaiman returns to the territory of his masterpiece, American Gods (soon to be a Starz Original Series) to once again probe the dark recesses of the soul.
God is dead. Meet the kids.
Fat Charlie Nancy’s normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn’t know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother. Now brother Spider is on his doorstep—about to make Fat Charlie’s life more interesting . . . and a lot more dangerous.
“Thrilling, spooky, and wondrous.” —Denver Post
“Awesomely inventive.… When you take the free-fall plunge into a Neil Gaiman book, anything can happen and anything invariably does.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Delightful, funny and affecting.... A tall tale to end all tall tales.” —Washington Post Book World
Review “Witty and engaging.” From the Back Cover Fat Charlie Nancy’s normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn’t know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother. Now brother Spider is on his doorstep—about to make Fat Charlie’s life more interesting . . . and a lot more dangerous. --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author Neil Gaiman is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of books for children and adults whose award-winning titles include Norse Mythology, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), Coraline, and The Sandman graphic novels. Neil Gaiman is a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR and Professor in the Arts at Bard College. --This text refers to the paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Fat Charlie Nancy's normal life is turned upside down when his father dies and a brother he never knew he had shows up at his doorstep. When that brother, Spider, starts to wear out his welcome, Fat Charlie learns that his father was not a man but the trickster god, Anansi, and both he and Spider have inherited some of Dad's godliness. This leads Fat Charlie to explore his own godly heritage in order to be rid of Spider. Listeners of Coraline can attest that Gaiman is a fine reader, so any narrators who read his novels have a lot to live up to. Lenny Henry, however, is absolutely the perfect choice to read Anansi Boys—he not only has Gaiman's cadences and style down pat, but he also ranges his accent from British to Caribbean with ease and provides distinct and memorable voices for all of the characters. An absolutely top-notch performance, one that makes a terrific book even better. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From AudioFile Neil Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS presented a modern look at ancient gods that left fans wanting more about the characters. Gaiman's ANANSI BOYS focuses on the ancient African spider-god Anansi the Trickster. Narrator Lenny Henry has one of those great British voices that is always interesting. His perfect use of Caribbean accents and strange animalistic human voices is a joy. The story of the sons of Anansi, one with god-like powers and the other human, is compelling. Gaiman offers a twist that alone makes the story worthwhile. One amusing aspect is that one of Henry's characters, a bird-woman, sounds exactly like Yoda from STAR WARS. M.S. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From School Library Journal Adult/High School–Charles Fat Charlie Nancy leads a normal, boring existence in London. However, when he calls the U.S. to invite his estranged father to his wedding, he learns that the man just died. After jetting off to Florida for the funeral, Charlie not only discovers a brother he didn't know he had, but also learns that his father was the West African trickster god, Anansi. Charlie's brother, who possesses his own magical powers, later visits him at home and spins Charlie's life out of control, getting him fired, sleeping with his fiancée, and even getting him arrested for a white-collar crime. Charlie fights back with assistance from other gods, and that's when the real trouble begins. They lead the brothers into adventures that are at times scary or downright hysterical. At first Charlie is overwhelmed by this new world, but he is Anansi's son and shows just as much flair for trickery as his brother. With its quirky, inventive fantasy, this is a real treat for Gaiman's fans. Here, he writes with a fuller sense of character. Focusing on a smaller cast gives him the room to breathe life into these figures. Anansi is also a story about fathers, sons, and brothers and how difficult it can be to get along even when they are so similar. Darkly funny and heartwarming to the end, this book is an addictive read not easily forgotten.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From Booklist *Starred Review* Gaiman exploits the conceit of his prizewinning American Gods (2001)--that the gods of America's immigrant peoples are living in retirement, sort of, among us--for the purposes of a romantic screwball comedy seasoned with murder, magic, and ghosts. For feckless Fat Charlie Nancy--who actually was fat only between ages 10 and 14, during which period his mother left his father in Florida and took Charlie with her to England--his glad-handin', practical-jokin' father has always been an embarrassment, and things just get worse after the old man croaks. At the interment, the neighbor lady tells Charlie he has a brother, and to ask a spider for him if he wants to get in touch. One drunken night back in London, Charlie takes the ludicrous advice. BLAM-O! Spider (that's his name) arrives, steals his girlfriend (she thinks Spider's Charlie), gets him terminated (and put under police suspicion by his embezzling boss), sets him bouncing between London and Florida by airplane and between our reality and that of ancient African animal-gods by seance, and has him winding up, after some pretty scary goings-on, with a new life and a new love on the Caribbean isle of St. Andrews. Charlie and Spider are, you see, their father's sons, and since he was/is Anansi the trickster-god, they can pull some pretty nifty stunts, though Charlie takes awhile learning how. As for Gaiman, he's the folksy, witty, foolishly wise narrator to perfection, drawing us into the web he weaves as skillfully as any . . . spider. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From The Washington Post With Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman's delightful, funny and affecting new novel, the bestselling author has scored the literary equivalent of a hole in one, employing the kind of self-assured storytelling that makes it all look so easy. One can imagine Gaiman's legion of fans putting down the book and rushing en masse to pen their own riffs on traditional folklore and contemporary pop culture. But it's hard to imagine anyone topping Anansi Boys, if only because it's a tall tale to end all tall tales, inspired by the trickiest of all trickster gods, Anansi the Spider, whose origins lie in Ghana.Tales of the West African deity traveled with slaves to North America, where the clever spider became the anthropomorphic figure known as Aunt Nancy, Anancy, or Bre'r Ananse (a counterpart to Bre'r Rabbit, another African American trickster). In Gaiman's last full-length novel, American Gods, Anansi made an appearance as the (mostly) human Mr. Nancy. In Anansi Boys, Mr. Nancy cedes center stage to his sons, Fat Charlie and Spider. As the novel's catchphrase puts it, "God is dead. Meet the kids." Only Anansi isn't exactly God; he's a god, sort of the god next door: "In the old stories, Anansi lives just like you do or I do, in his house. He is greedy, of course, and lustful, and tricky, and full of lies. And he is good-hearted, and lucky, and sometimes even honest. Sometimes he is good, sometimes he is bad. He is never evil. Mostly, you are on Anansi's side. This is because Anansi owns all the stories." Anansi isn't exactly dead, either, though it's true that Fat Charlie's troubles begin when he attends his estranged father's burial. Fat Charlie "was only ever fat for a handful of years. . . . But the name Fat Charlie clung to him, like chewing gum to the sole of a tennis shoe." He grew up in Florida but now lives in London, where he is engaged to a nice girl named Rosie, who won't sleep with him until after they're married. He works for the loathsome, weaselly Grahame Coats, a talent agent who for years has been fleecing his clients, including the delectable Maeve Livingstone, widow of Morris Livingstone, "once the most famous short Yorkshire comedian in Britain." Fat Charlie's pre-marital and career woes work in tandem with his chronic insecurity and a constant, slow-burning sense of embarrassment, guaranteeing that nothing very exciting will ever happen to him -- until, that is, he goes to Florida for Mr. Nancy's funeral. Afterwards, Charlie visits some family friends, four little old ladies who just happen to be witches. The most formidable of these is Mrs. Dunwiddy: "As a boy, Fat Charlie had imagined Mrs. Dunwiddy in Equatorial Africa, peering disapprovingly through her thick spectacles at the newly-erect hominids. 'Keep out of my front yard,' she would tell a recently evolved and rather nervous specimen of Homo habilis, 'or I going to belt you around your ear-hole, I tell you.' " There's also Mrs. Higgler, who tells Fat Charlie that his father was a god." 'He was not a god. He was my dad.' " 'You can be both,' she said. 'It happens.' " And Mrs. Higgler informs Fat Charlie that, if he wants to see the brother he never knew he had, all he has to do is tell a spider. Charlie, who obviously never learned that it is extremely unwise to scoff at witchy old ladies, returns to London and rescues a spider from his bathtub. Perhaps it was the devil in him. Probably it was the alcohol. " 'If you see my brother,' said Fat Charlie to the spider, 'tell him he ought to come by and say hello.' " And of course, his brother -- nicknamed Spider -- does just that. Spider is everything Charlie is not: lucky, debonair, smoothly confident, possessed of their father's silver tongue and gift for wooing women. Before you can say ouch, Spider has stolen his brother's job, his fiancée, the best room in Fat Charlie's house. Rosie doesn't just tumble into Spider's arms: She tumbles into bed with him and shows few signs of ever getting out again. Worse, the awful Grahame Coats frames Fat Charlie for embezzlement and has him thrown in jail. Now, you might think that none of this could possibly be Fat Charlie's fault. But you would be wrong. He summoned Spider; now he realizes he has to get rid of him. Fat Charlie returns to Florida and the four old ladies, who concoct a ritual that gains him entry to the spirit world where totemic animal-gods dwell. And that's when things get really interesting. Gaiman first came to prominence in the late 1980s with The Sandman, the brilliant series that helped reinvent comics and put graphic novels on the map as Literature with a capital L. His previous full-length books, while wildly popular, are hit-or-miss, hobbled by epic ambitions that can occasionally seem pretentious and clever conceits that overpower other concerns such as characterization and pacing. In Anansi Boys, he gets it all right: Here, Gaiman's storytelling instincts are as remarkable and assured as Anansi's own. As Fat Charlie frantically attempts to undo the damage he's caused and save his brother Spider, and the world, from the forces he's unwittingly loosed, Anansi Boys becomes darker, richer, wiser than any of Gaiman's earlier works. Here's old Mr. Nancy, in his ghostly guise: " 'Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren't just thinking of hunting and being hunted any more. Now they're starting to think their way out of problems -- sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep their bellies full, but now they're trying to figure out how to do it without working -- and that's the point where people start using their heads. . . . That's when they start to make the world.' " Lewis Hyde titled his noted study of the trickster mythos Trickster Makes This World. With Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman has made it his own world, too, and given readers a first-class ticket for the journey there. Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From Bookmarks Magazine In the bestselling American Gods (2001), the gods of old European, African, and other mythologies retired as ordinary, if eccentric, people. One of these gods, Charlie’s father, appears in the follow-up novel, Anansi Boys. Gaiman, best known for his 1990s Sandman comic book series, describes his new work as "a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic," and critics agree that it’s all that and more. Some noted the conventional nature of the comedy-drama part, with a fast-paced plot driving a narrative about good and evil. And as fantasy, Anansi Boys "is certainly quite inventive, if not revolutionary" (San Antonio Express-News). Overall, Gaiman’s novel is witty, giddy, and exhilarating—if not quite as satisfying as some of his previous work.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Read more
