Reviews with content warning for Fatphobia - Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

I think this is a rare case of the adaptation being better than the original book. I had seen the TV series before reading this and I'm honestly surprised at how much the show made up considering how long this book is. My biggest issue with this book is that the entire middle part was tedious, mainly focusing on the Them, Anathema, Newt and Shadwell for 120 pages, yet for all these characters it felt like nothing of note was really happening. I was bored and just wanting the narrative to switch back to Crowley and Aziraphale

(the latter stuck reading a book for those 120 pages, doing nothing else, just reading and having the narration describing it)

I could forgive it slightly if it was actually funny, but I found myself barely smiling at any jokes. Like this is well written in terms of sentence structure and I would occassionaly, absentmindly go "Oh that's kinda clever", but after a while it became tortuous to read through so much unhumorous descriptions with way, way too many characters. Many of whom are only there for a page or two and take away from the main cast. Even most of the main cast I didn't care for (I can see why the show focused more on Aziraphale and Crowley as they are the best characters who really work well off each other). The show added way more things that were actually interesting to the themes (Heaven and Hell having way more of a presence, Aziraphale and Crowley being shown through the ages - it's honestly shocking how little time they interact in the book compared to everyone else) that the book just feels so hollow in comparison.

Another thing that caught me off guard was the amount of racism, misogyny, ableism, fatphobia and homophobia (I was aware of the infamous scene where Aziraphale is called the f slur by a child but not everything else) that is scattered throughout. The parts where it pops up made an already tedious reading experience into an aggravating one. It's strange, I've read a bunch of Pratchett's work and I don't recall coming across anything this bad (I don't know about Gaiman's work and frankly with what's been happening reccently I don't want to buy his books to check).

This is the closest I've ever DNF a book and it came close several times. I've rated this slightly higher due to the ending, which stops trying to crack as many unfunny jokes to actually talk about the themes & characters in a way that makes you reflect. Where was that the rest of the book??

Again, you're better off watching the show and save yourself the trouble.

Content Warnings

michayla13's review against another edition

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adventurous lighthearted slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I finally picked this book back up after DNFing it a few years back. I almost never leave reviews, my only exception is when I don’t like a book, and this was definitely one of those times. I feel like your book doesn’t really work when the whole premise is based on satirizing religion and tries to make fun of people who use their religious views for bigotry when at the same time your book is filled with non-satirical bigotry. The casual racism in this book was pretty shocking since I’ve really only heard rave reviews for it. I think that this is one of those times when people are blinded by their love for the story. I didn’t like the way the women were written, as soon as their male love interests came into the picture, they lost all previous personality. And the scene comparing terrorists to freedom fighters didn’t really come as a surprise seeing as Neil Gaiman is a Zionist.

On a less serious note, one of my bookish pet peeves is phonetically spelling out dialogue to show a character’s accent - and that happened constantly. We get it, this character has an accent. You don’t need to stunt the dialogue by making everything impossible to read.

I hope that I forget this book soon, it wasn’t worth the time and effort.

Content Warnings