Humans, Spiders, and Tigers, Oh My!

Originally, I was a little unsure of reading Anasai Boys. I just read The Graveyard Book for another class. I thought it was extremely slow moving in the beginning, I practically wanted bad things to happen to the main character so something worthwhile would happen. When my teacher for that class, Ryan Van Cleave, said that Gainman tended to write a lot of different genres, I decided to give this book a chance. This book in terms of pacing was much faster than the other. While I had to wait for practically one hundred pages for the main character, Bod, of The Graveyard Book to grow up, Anasai Boys immediately cut to the chase: your father is dead. Throughout the book, it was all about lots of action and it was well cut. At first I thought Charlie flying inbetween Florida and London on planes and such would be another 100 pages of boring filler but in almost a page or two it was over and it didn't even seemed rushed, it just seemed normal. And I love following Fat Charlie because he was one of those lovable losers. Everything he did was just so comedic.

I wasn't sure at first where he got the idea of the animal folklore concept. I'm interested in the voodoo gods and that sort of thing so when I thought it had something to do with Caribbean and African lore. I really loved the way the stories were intricately connected. I've never seen a story that was reflected so much. I mean there were the stories of the past the narrator would tell us, the story on the human level, and story on the god level so to speak—where Spider fought the Tiger. It was like the oral tradition of telling stories in African countries was reflected exclusively throughout this entire book.

It was really funny, I actually figured Spider and Fat Charlie were the same person throughout the book. This was probably enhanced by the women both being named after flowers. To me it seemed like Daisy was the fun one and Rosie was sort of the stable one. I think Spider and Charlie's interactions sort of brought together a sort of trade. Spider seemed to calm down a bit in terms of all the magic and Charlie gained confidence and some power himself. It gave a really interesting family relationship as well. Charlie started off kind of ostracized from his father and at the end it was kind of like passing the gauntlet, Charlie was acting just like his father and walking around in his hat. And the life cycle went on when Charlie was talking to mermaids with his son just like Charlie and his father in the beginning.