Reviews with content warning for Confinement - Anansi Boys

tricky one to rate and i'm not sure how i feel about it really
[spoilers throughout]
Pros:
- the imagination of it really was excellent. the mythic gods were brilliantly described and creepy, with the Bird Woman lurking in the field from Charlie's train and generally being very spooky
- the characters were done well, especially Daisy and Maeve, I thought. they were brought in rather randomly and then woven in to be intricately part of the story and that was very effective and satisfying. Graham Coats was a convincing and awful villain, mundane enough to be realistic but still so uneasily disturbing at the same time. Him being the human equivalent of Tiger was clever and cool
- how the story all tied up was my favourite part, very satisfying. there was a great deal of character growth in Charlie and Spider, and to a lesser extent Rosie and Daisy too. Charlie and Spider's arc reminds me of the two sisters in that children's story I read - where one reckless sister learns to be more thoughtful, and the too-careful sister learns to be a little brave. they were two parts of the same whole (loved that reveal) and they needed to come together to balance each other out a bit.
- Charlie's magic coming into itself, and him becoming more confident with it, was great to see too. he had his own sort of magic, as long as he could believe in it he could make others believe it too. and i'm glad he wasn't totally healed, ie. he still got a bit of stage fright beforehand.
- in the interview questions, Gaiman says that he never intended for it to go as dark as it does with Maeve's muder, but I'm glad it did. I enjoyed the dark punch of the Bird Woman's sinister awfulness, Tiger's violence, and Graham being frighteningly terrible. it definitely upped the stakes and gave the book a real bite - the gods felt like convincingly powerful and also callous beings.

cons:
- so I hated the start and middle of this book. Charlie was painful to read, Spider I loathed and Rosie frustrated me (and continued to throughout the book). I understand that there was a satisfying arc for the brothers' characters and Spider definitely got his comeuppance, but I still wanted to DNF it because i was so fed up with them.
- and the biggest part of why I hated it, and the point that was never dealt with, was how Spider raped Rosie. She never wanted sex with Charlie and she knew him and planned to marry him. Spider had sex with her under false presences (legally rape) and using his "miracle" magic on her. He influences her to go away or do as he wishes with no compunction and there's no consequences for this except him being a bit sad he lost her for a spell. She slaps him and its forgotten about. Charlie also makes little to no effort to save Rosie from getting duped and influenced by Spider and is only pissed that *he's* losing his fiancée. he gives absolutely no shits that she, a woman who would never have had sex with Charlie when she's herself, got magicked into having sex. Really disgusting
- I know this was written in 2005, but there are some horrible little asides or so called jokes. One I remember was saying something derogatory about people who see things, ie. making a mean-spirited joke of schizophrenia, another about cross-dressing, and there were many other places I winced. Gaiman says Anansi is meant to be about 'the revenge of the weak', but the book is still cruel to people already trodden on by society, and it's treatment of Rosie was shit as hell
- Gaiman also says in the interview notes at the back that it's a comic book. I found very little in it funny. There was one point I chuckled and that was it, I think. the jokes just didn't land for me.

so... very mixed feelings. Hated the start and middle, but the end was very satisfying and I stayed up late to finish it.

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