Many reviewers draw parallels to American Gods. So read those so I don't have to repeat them.

So this occurs in Moscow, and Russian gods and heads of myth do take part in the story. But what really irked me was how often I just lost the threads of what was going on. I had a hard time making sense of the story multiple times. Or I'd catch myself daydreaming, and then rewinding the audio so I could catch what just happened. Usually multiple times in the same spot.

And that thread of not understanding thankfully kept right up to the conclusion, so at the very least the book is consistently hard to follow.

I don't recommend this. Go read American Gods instead. Or a book of Russian myths.

This novel evokes a palpable sense of Moscow: the frustrating corruption in everyday life, the absurdities required to just get by, the despair, the human horrors of the recent past, and the weight of history and ideology upon every place and person.

It is also like a tour of Russian mythological creatures and personages, all of which can be found -- or invoked -- in the ghostly underground.

The plot itself is a bit unpredictable, but that's okay. The book is mainly about the characters, the place and its history, and the fact that perfectly happy endings seem impossible in eternal, tragic Moscow.

This book is like a weird mix between Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and Katherine Arden's The Bear And The Nightingale. It's bittersweet and beautiful with a dark grimness that isn't hopeless, but definitely toes the line.

I seriously loved everything about this book and I'm sure I'll be re-reading this one in the future. Only warning I have is that there are some slightly graphicish self harm parts, but there aren't very many of them.

The atmosphere was incredibly depressing and the ending was more sideways than traditionally happy, but these are good and fitting things for this particular book. I had fun separating the bits of folklore and myth I recognized from those I didn't and I think I might have accidentally picked up a little more tourist etiquette, but the thing I like best is the modern application of the old Underworld theme--the darker Other Side where humans are removed from time and strange beings and creatures make their homes. What's happened to those places as human cultures have changed? Do the inhabitants fade into the soil? If you go there, will you be ever be able to leave?

Questions to think about.

Adored this. Mix of Slavic mythology and real history and imagined things and deeply real things, with this half-nowhere atmosphere I couldn't get enough of. The characters - original, mythological, and symbolic - are vibrant, heartwrenching. If the Night Watch books are post-Soviet urban fantasy noir, this is a post-Soviet fairytale.

The name is quite an enigmatic one don't you think ? The secret history of Moscow makes you think of mythology & strange creatures, the backdrop of the Onion shaped domes of the Kremlin providing an ambience that few can match and so forth. What I have described above is true in parts when applied to this story but as a whole it is unsatisfying a dish !

At one glance it is a good mix of Gaiman's American Gods & Neverwhere . There is a world beneath our dwellings and populated by the icons,gods and symbols that time has so beneficially forgotten. Unlike American Gods , the mythology here is almost completely comprised of Slavic roots. But to the author's credit, here is where the comparison ends for she has done a good world build up and the characters that populate this underground world are quite amusing to spend time with. Most of them except the well renowned ones have their individual tales woven into the fabric of the main plot and this in itself is the fun part. As much as I liked a majority of the minor characters, I must say that the main protagonists are not the kind I would think about after I moved on to other books. They are somehow....too plain to be given second thoughts ! I think I have been reading too many books this years based in Russia. Like the ones I have read before, this one too captures the dreary spirit of Russia in the 90's & in an extremely engaging way too.

Then there is also the part about the whole structure of the story line. After going through a good 85% of the story, it all whooshes by and suddenly the tale comes to an end. As a reader I had no clue as to the intentions of the antagonists and what the whole purpose of the story was. As far as a satisfying conclusion goes, this sucked !