Anansi Boys is a well-crafted, entertaining, witty and creative book...with disappointing treatment of its female characters. The book tells the story of Fat Charlie Nancy, who has grown to a somewhat disappointing adulthood knowing his father was odd, charismatic and humiliating, but not realizing that's because he was really the spider god Anansi. After his father's death, his life is turned upside-down by his long-lost brother, Spider, and he must go on a fantastical, magical, mythical quest to find himself again. The women in the book are plucky and clever but don't have much of a character arc. What's more disconcerting is the casual depiction of rape by deception - while that's a very familiar event in mythology, I'd hope that a modern retelling would be a bit more critical of the trope.