The Graveyard Book

I came to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book with high expectations. The only other Gaiman book I've read is Coraline, which I loved. That, plus Graveyard's Newbury win created a lot of hype. The beginning, though, was similar to how Tim Burton described Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in an interview for his movie: a brat wandering around in a strange world where odd things happen to her.

The young protagonist, who we come to know as Nobody "Bod" Owens, barely escapes when a stranger murders the rest of his family. (A lot of children's lit is dark, but the beginning of this book was particularly so!) He crawls across the street to the neighborhood graveyard where, unlike the rest of the living, he is able to see the ghosts who inhabit it. The Owenses adopt him and Silas, who hovers somewhere in between the dead and the living, agrees to take care of him--bringing him food, monitoring his education, etc. The ghosts all pitch in to teach him usual and unique lessons: reading, writing, arithmetic, fading, dream-walking . . . He also explores a fantastical underworld, befriends a witch, and discovers the mysterious Sleer.

The second half of the book is where it really picked up. Bod crosses paths with the man who killed his family and works to uncover why he targeted them. Bod also discovers the drawbacks of living among the dead:

"In the graveyard no one ever changed. The little children Bod had played with when he was small were still little children; Fortinbras Bartleby, who had once been his best friend, was now four or five years younger than Bod was . . . "

This, plus the many scenes emphasizing how important Bod's lessons are, is what won the Newbury.

The Graveyard Book was an interesting pairing with Her Fearful Symmetry--although, I do find it slightly odd that I read two books set in a creepy English graveyard in the span of a few months. The Gaiman book was by far the better--a fun adventure set between earth and the afterlife.