The Graveyard Book

First off, I would like to wish all of you lovelies─and most especially your mothers─a happy mothers day! Make sure you hug all those lovely mums and/or mother figures in your life!

Now. Down to business.

Author: Neil Gaiman  (pronounced Gaym’n, for those of you who wondered).

Genre: Children’s Literature/fantasy.

Language: Perfectly clean.

Heat Level (on a scale of 0-5): 0.

Violence (on a scale of 0-5): 3, but it didn’t leave me feeling like a had just stumbled through a bloody war and watched all of my best friends die, like some books… you know the kind? I also wasn’t surprised by any of it, either. It is Gaiman, after all. And called the Graveyard Book.

Plot:

This truly was an enchanting book. I’ve read many tales involving ghosts and ghouls and the like, but never something that personified them so well, showing them as more than simply scary things that go bump in the night. I laughed and, yes, even cried as I took this journey with Bod, watching him grow from an innocent orphaned baby to a curious child to an even more curious young man (“curiouser and curiouser!” Anybody? Anybody? Nobody. Hah! Two references!) I felt first his fear, and then his anger when he learned of the man who killed his whole family while he escaped, and, consequentially, the Convocation who was after him. I felt his love for Mr. and Mrs. Owens. I felt his mix of respect, fear, and love for his guardian Silas: Silas, whom I loved from the start.

I won’t go into much detail about the plot of the Graveyard Book, as I don’t want to give anything too big away. I respect everyone’s need for a spoiler-free existence, even if mine is anything but. (Darn Goodreads and that tantalizing little link that reads show spoilers am I right?) However I will drop a slight hint, and say that the use of Jacks literally made my jaw drop and my book go diving off of my lap and to my deck that I was sitting on.

Gaiman’s crisp, intelligent, funny, slightly sarcastic at times prose is wonderful for many reasons, one of the main ones being that I never feel as if I’m being written down to when I read his stuff. I’ve read adult novels of his and I’ve read children’s novels of his, and I can honestly say that the quality of writing was absolutely the same. I find it exhilarating when I find a book for children that doesn’t make me wander about the house speaking baby speak. Children can comprehend just as well as adults in my humble opinion, and I think this author really gets that.

I normally don’t read books with illustrations, but this was one of those exceptions. They were sparse, but when they were there they were eye-catching and encompassed whole pages at a time.

I suppose what I mean to say is, this book might be advertised as children’s fiction, but that in no way means that people of all ages won’t enjoy it.

That’s all for today, lovelies! Read on!