BOOK REVIEW: Neil Gaiman's GRAVEYARD BOOK

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is one of the most celebrated books of 2009, having won the most prestigious award in juvenile fiction, the John Newbery Medal, earlier in the year.

Gaiman is the celebrated author of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning American Gods (MadProfessah is still working on a review after reading the book in May 2008--see my earlier post on the relationship between the excellence of a book and the longer it takes me to review it).

Gaiman's book was also recently awarded the Hugo Award, beating out the expected winner, Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

The Graveyard Book is the story of Bod, the toddler who should have died when his parents and a sibling were all brutally murdered by a knife-wielding assassin and the child was protected by the inhabitants of a graveyard.

Bod is short for Nobody Owens, Owens being the family name of his adopted parents, Mr. & Mrs. Owens who were unable to have children when they were alive, and are ghosts who inhabit the graveyard in which Bod lives.

That Bod is a baby who grows up in a graveyard and thus can interact equally with ghosts and non-ghosts equivalently is a bit of a macabre, but interesting concept. The cast of characters in the graveyard a quirky, but generally uninteresting group. The most interesting of the bunch is Silas, the person(?) who rescued Bod and to an adult reader appears to have all the characteristics of a vampire (although he is never described as such--he also is never placed in either the living or non-living category definitively by the Omniscient Narrator.)

What truly limits The Graveyard Book, however, is its plot. The story follows the growing pains of a teenage boy who has an unusual family situation (he's the only living person among his family and his home is a graveyard!) but this is depicted in a completely predictable and surprisingly unimaginative fashion. The main tension in the story is that the assassin who killed Bod's family is still out there and looking to correct the one blemish on his perfect record of murders-for-hire. However, since this is juvenile fiction and Bod is the hero, this reader never really believed that Bod would be killed, although Gaiman does try his best to place Bod and some other characters the reader has invested time in learning about in real and extreme peril.

The final impression of The Graveyard Book is of a good idea that doesn't quite have enough meat on the bones of the plot to make a satisfying meal for the discerning (adult) reader, although someone less experienced (i.e. younger) may be more favorably impressed.

Published by HarperCollins. 320 pages.

PLOT: C.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B.
WRITING: B.

OVERALL GRADE: B-.