Neil Gaimain is certainly a very gifted author in the fantasy compartment; basically I'm giving three stars just as a recognition of this remarkable talent. In the end I found this book much overrated and the word "genius" definitely misplaced. 
 America is no country for old gods. Now people worship the gods of internet, free-ways and credit cards (o tempora, o mores!) and the old deities, arrived thousands of years ago with each migrant wave, are almost forgotten and at risk of disappearing in eternal oblivion. 
 Once-powerful divinities now bide their time on the edge of poverty as con-men, whores, fortune tellers, beggars; as in the perfectly conceived fairy tale, each of them stuck in a role that is somehow connected to what they there once worshipped for (old Anubis now works in a funeral parlour, how fitting!) so you would have to review a huge chunk of old mythology to appreciate the numerous reminds that Gaiman throws everywhere, a bit too cunningly for my tastes. 
 A war is coming (and it will keep coming for all the almost 600 pages of this very long book) and our human (?) hero, Shadow, will cover a main role in it even if he still doesn't know how and why. 
 Shadow is the typical big man with a brutish appearance but a good heart, someone mischievous people usually take advantage of until they reach his break point. A man of few words, an ex-con, a melancholic giant, he will strike you as the umpteenth replica of Michael Clark Duncan's character in The green mile. 
 Similarly, the road trip that takes the 90% of the novel is almost classic in its development: a sequence of little towns in the middle of nowhere, strange figures who are never what they seems to be, old men full of stories about the "old days", everything evolves as a dream (Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? 
 Oh, where have you been, my darling young one? 
 I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains 
 I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways 
 I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests 
 I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans...). 
 As a matter of fact a part of the journey is a sequence of hallucinating dreams, like a bad David Lynch movie, where mythological creatures speak in riddles and nonsenses, some of which have actually some sense and some are just choreography. 
 What I mean, in the end, is that despite a certain display of creativity, there is very few in this book that is really original and very much that could have been altogether skipped by the author. It is not just that the many digressions make the book a slow read, but that these digressions have no charm at all: not everything in a book must be plot related but if you decide to add places and conversation just for "decorative" purposes, give them some attractive quality, use a less plain language, add a little charm, add something! 
 Maybe it's just me but I really struggled to get to the end of the book and I don't really feel that adding some revealing plot twist in the last 50 pages makes up for dozens of pages of nothing with some good scene in between.