Book title: The Graveyard Book
Author: Neil Gaiman
Illustrator: Dave McKean
Publisher: HarperCollins
Number of pages: 307
Genre: fantasy, YA, horror, paranormal, middle grade, supernatural
Release Date: September 30th 2008
Goodreads Synopsis:
Nobody Owens, known 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 dangers 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.
A deliciously dark masterwork by bestselling author Neil Gaiman, with illustrations by award-winning Dave McKean.
My Review:
For me, the book really began at chapter 4. The first three chapters, I was unclear about what was going on.
It felt as though those chapters were written as an afterthought. You were introduced to “the man named Jack” and how he had killed the main characters family and then his character was barely mentioned throughout the book until towards the end. Again, I didn’t understand the point of this.
I wish the author focused more on Bod (main character) and those he met and grew to know as his family within the graveyard; and completely left out the parts about the man named Jack and The Order.
The middle of the book was the most interesting, but overall, I was left wondering what I had just read.
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