The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

I've generally liked Neil Gaiman. I haven't been reading much children's/YA lit lately, and admittedly Neil Gaiman is not at all a strictly children's writer. He's got a dark sense of humor that I enjoyed in Anansi Boys and his collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, both of which are written for an adult audience. But his writing style translates really well to books for younger audiences if, you know, you're an adult reading his books for younger audiences. I've lost the ability to read books from the perspective of a kid.

The Graveyard Book itself is not as dark as Coraline, which is the obvious comparison, even in spite of the opening scene in which a very young child escapes a knife-wielding killer who has just slaughtered his entire family and winds up in an old graveyard. Here Bod (short for Nobody) is taken in by the ghosts of the graveyard, who together bend the rules of the graveyard to protect their young ward.

A good portion of the book seems to be just about the life of a boy who is raised in a graveyard by ghosts. As far as I know, no author has ever explored this premise before, and this is where Gaiman has the chance to really excel. It's a novel premise, and it allows him to be creative, and sometimes quite funny. In the meantime, all the little vignettes are quietly adding up to the real story, and the finale in which Bod confronts his family's killer.

And that's the strength of the book. There's not real surprise lurking on the horizon, but the pieces come together subtly, so that you don't fully realize that as a world is being created on the pages, a story is being created as well. Still, I found myself wishing that Gaiman put a little more time into creating his world without as much concern for story. My favorite moment in the book was the Dance Macabre, in which living and dead alike came together for one brief night. The chapter did very little, if anything, to advance the plot, and yet it felt very purposeful in creating and exploring the relationship between the dead and the living, a relationship that was at the center of the novel. I wanted more of these moments, more exploration of the strange mythology that Gaiman created for the purposes of the novel.

Still, I liked the book. It's unlike anything I've read before, and those are the kinds of children's or young adult books I like best.