I am not the person to do this, but someone please link me to essays about Gaiman and writing Blackness because ooo boy I had a hot minute at the beginning where I went "aren't they supposed to be Black?" and then realized yes, they were supposed to be. I know Nalo Hopkinson was basically his sensitivity reader re: the Caribbean stuff, but ooo boy some of it just read weird, mostly the way Fat Charlie interacted with like other Black people. But again, not my place to write that hot take, I just really want to read stuff about it.

Now that that is out of the way, this book was like good but I would say not as good as I normally feel about Gaiman? I usually call Gaiman a writer's author, because I always walk away wanting to write more. That was not the case with this book, and it's not clear to me if I've just hit a point in my life where that is no longer the case or if it was the book. That being said, it did move quickly, and I had a good time reading it, it just didn't meet my expectations or my nostalgic memory of it. Still a good book! Just not as good as I remembered.