Reviews with content warning for Blood - Neverwhere

I liked this book, but didn't love it. It certainly wasn't my favorite Neil Gaiman book. My favorite was either "Stardust" or "Ocean." To be fair to Mr. Gaiman and the story, however, this is not my normal genre. The story itself was good and very imaginative. I haven't enjoyed villains like Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar for a long time! I kept feeling like they'd look like plague doctors with the bird masks. I'm not much into urban fiction, so I could've enjoyed this book more, but the story is very good. I'd read a cookbook if Mr. Gaiman wrote it! I read in a book forum that Neil Gaiman's books are for children. This one definitely was NOT! This is NOT a kid friendly book, people!

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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Everything in this review is based on a sample size of the three Neil Gaiman books I’ve actually read (this one, American Gods, and Anansi Boys), but discounting American Gods as an outlier since it was, you know, actually enjoyable. So feel free to take this whole review with a grain of salt.

Now that that’s said – I hope Neil Gaiman is okay.

Excepting American Gods, the two books of his I’ve read feature protagonists who are spineless, vaguely depressed young men with mediocre-to-horrible corporate jobs, dating strong-willed, domineering, beautiful women whom they let walk all over them. In this book, Richard made his first independent choice when he defied his girlfriend to help a girl bleeding in the street, and even though it was only about 15% of the way into the book I was SO READY for her to go.

I think Richard was the reason I didn’t end up finishing this one. I could not bring myself to care about him. There were some vaguely interesting things happening around him – a very weird homeless girl named Door, people who seem to be able to talk to rats, sewer tunnels going places sewer tunnels could not logically go – but Richard himself was so boring. He didn’t even have enough personality to actively hate – the best I could manage was aggressive indifference.

It’s funny to me that the same things I hate about Richard in Neverwhere – the bland generic everyman-ness, seemingly existing for the sole purpose of being the reader’s avatar through a weird and magical world – I didn’t mind at all in Shadow in American Gods. I think part of it was the spineless-man-with-domineering-girlfriend aspect, which is a horrible dynamic and not one Shadow was part of since he was a widower.

I think the other part is agency. I’m always complaining about characters having agency. Whether they’re forced into dealing with something by the plot or by their own dealings, whether their actions make things better or worse, the only thing I require of characters is that they take actions of their own volition. I’ve stopped reading because characters did their best to avoid acting and because characters were prevented from taking any action. The one and only action Richard chose to take was to help the bleeding girl against his girlfriend’s wishes, and then he pretty much got dragged along for the rest of what I read. And I couldn’t bring myself to care about anything happening since it was all happening to him instead of him actually being involved in the story.

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