Quick Review of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys

Cribbed from rec.arts.sf.written, where I originally posted it 9/9/05:

I loved it, but I'm selling it in the club, so I'm not unbiased. It's funnier than anything else I remember seeing from Gaiman, and his words are, as always, a joy to read. I see so much clunky prose that it's a thrill to read someone who cares about sentence structure and choosing exactly the right word and all of those non-SFnal "literary" things.

Anansi Boys also has a much better ending than American Gods, which I thought sort of fizzled out. (Yes, I know why the plot had to come out that way, and I agree with it, it's just the big scene in which things don't happen didn't quite work the way I thought it should.) Anansi Boys sticks the landing, and it's the kind of book where four things are happening at once and they all dovetail perfectly.

I'd compare it to Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books (or maybe a slightly less funny, more SFnal book of his like Smoke); it's a finely tuned machine, with all gears turning exactly as they should to produce a delicate and beautiful object.