I’ve read some amazing books this past week. Tomorrow’s #9 of 100 was a tough choice between two very good books: one fiction, one memoir. The memoir won the 100 books record, but the fiction is so not diminished at all.
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal for 2008 a few weeks ago. I finally read it in entirety (me and my starting books habit is really bad) and was so pleased with Gaiman for such a literary treasure.
Amazon.com writes,
In The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman has created a charming allegory of childhood. Although the book opens with a scary scene–a family is stabbed to death by “a man named Jack” –the story quickly moves into more child-friendly storytelling. The sole survivor of the attack–an 18-month-old baby–escapes his crib and his house, and toddles to a nearby graveyard. Quickly recognizing that the baby is orphaned, the graveyard’s ghostly residents adopt him, name him Nobody (“Bod”), and allow him to live in their tomb. Taking inspiration from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Gaiman describes how the toddler navigates among the headstones, asking a lot of questions and picking up the tricks of the living and the dead. In serial-like episodes, the story follows Bod’s progress as he grows from baby to teen, learning life’s lessons amid a cadre of the long-dead, ghouls, witches, intermittent human interlopers. A pallid, nocturnal guardian named Silas ensures that Bod receives food, books, and anything else he might need from the human world. Whenever the boy strays from his usual play among the headstones, he finds new dangers, learns his limitations and strengths, and acquires the skills he needs to survive within the confines of the graveyard and in wider world beyond.
What I think
Fabulous. A delight for children 10 and up. A fantastic series of episodes that make you adore Bod, and secretly wish you could have been raised in a graveyard yourself. The graveyard “family” was so realistic and delightful that I hope we see more of this crew in books to come. I say this one is better than Coraline!
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This book sounds fantastic! Maybe I’ll pick it up for my neice (who turns 12 next month). I’ve always thought of graveyards as a place of peace, not horror. This story puts another new spin on a setting that seems to have a bad rap. Thank you for sharing!
-A
It is super good. She’ll love it. The beginning starts out with violence, but you don’t stick with that as the baby toddles to the graveyard through the open front door, and then you’re pulled into the graveyard folks and they are WONDERFUL.
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