American God's
Spoilers! I just finished listening to American God's and just wanted to talk about something I noticed. First of all the book was great and I enjoyed it. The thing I wanted to talk about was shadows ancestry. The book tells us towards the end that shadow is the son of Odin. That surprised me, during the whole book I felt that it hinted at him being an Indian. How Sam told him he looked Indian, how whiskeyjack asked if he had found his tribe yet, the buffalo being taking to him, and the collest one was when he talked about the children colorbooks. How you at first did not see the whole picture and "the shadow turned out to be an Indian".
I just felt these things made a great setup for him being of Indian ancestry.
Is it possible his mother was Indian? What do you think?
Also I listened to the audiobook so I might have misheard something. Sorry for the rambling post and bad formatting. I finished the book late and I just wanted to post this before going to bed.
Posted Apr 11, 2015, 12:04 AM UTC
I'm guessing you mean American Indian, not Indian, a person from India.
And this has a boringly simple answer. Every child has two parents. And 4 grandparents. And 8 great-grandparents. Odin only has to show up there once and the rest could be American Indian.
This. It was probably Gaiman's way of describing Shadow because (if i remember correctly) the whole book took place from his perspective, and that can sometimes be difficult to describe someone unless using a cheesy "he looked in the mirror" method.