Fiction Book Reviews

Now that I’ve actually read it, I’m doubly pleased that The Graveyard Book won the Newbery, because it’s a wonderful book with an amazingly creative premise—a boy whose family is murdered is taken in and raised by a graveyard full of ghosts, along with a few other guardians who aren’t ghosts but aren’t exactly human either (one is basically a werewolf, and the other is a vampire, which I totally did not figure out until Neil actually said so on the Colbert Report. I r smrt.). I was thoroughly taken in by the first couple pages, with the man Jack’s terrifying, methodical murder, but to be honest, I was a little concerned—that the murder would just sort of happen and we wouldn’t find out why or what would happen to the man Jack, that the book would just be a coming-of-age story for Nobody Owens without much of an overarching plot.

And then I reminded myself, don’t be silly, this is Neil Gaiman and you can trust him. I did, and he didn’t disappoint: it’s a coming-of-age story, certainly, tracing Bod’s life from toddlerhood up to about age 14, but it definitely has a plot, and it’s rich with the kind of worldbuilding and mythological elements you can play with when your character spends his life among the dead. There’s a twist near the end that I did see coming, but that didn’t bother me much; it just put me in an agony of suspense for characters who didn’t know their own danger, so of course I wanted to reach through the pages and yell at them to watch out, which at least shows that they were real enough to make me invested in them.

But I can’t give my full opinion on this without spoiling the ending, so read on at your own risk. (more…)