First published in 2008 by Bloomsbury
Nobody Owens, know to his friends as Bod, is a perfectly normal boy. Well, he would be perfectly normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the world of the dead.
There are danger and adventures for Bod in the graveyard: The strange and terrible menace of The Sleer; a gravestone entrance to a desert that leads to the city of ghouls; friendship with a witch, and so much more.
But it is in the land of the living that real danger lurks, for it is there that the man Jack lives and he has already killed Bod's family.
I know I am going to be in the minority when I say that I didn't care for this book. I am a fan of Mr. Gaiman's. Neverwhere is my all time favorite book by him with Coraline a close second. The Graveyard Book started out promising with the murder of a family and the escape of a 18 month old boy into a graveyard. The ghosts living there decide to raise him to keep him safe from the man "Jack" who wants to kill him. I was all set to settle into a good ghost story. But, I got to the second disc and was wondering where it was. Not even the wonderful narration by the author himself could make me want to keep going.
One of the biggest problems I had was the characters acting and sounding older than they were. When Bod is 5, he meets Scarlet who is also around 5. The problem was that they acted and sounded like they are 8 or 9. That really bothers me in any book that I read. I also felt like the story wasn't moving along fast enough for me. It was just kind of "meh" and I didn't care enough to see where it went.
I think this is one of those that you have to try for yourself. Who knows, maybe you will like it more than me.
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