Book Review: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Second time through on this (and second time reviewed on this blog). This time the story was read aloud to a 10 and 11-year-old. The second half was read in the car on a long drive and it pulled in the 43-year-old mother of those two as well, especially with its themes of growing up and finding, then leaving, home. To anyone turned off by the book's dark beginning, I'd say, read it through to the end, see where it's going. The pacing and storytelling of the long climactic chapter seven is a writer's workshop of skill, and then chapter eight is a melancholy coda that brings it all home. This is simply a good book, as good in its way as its inspiration (Kipling's Jungle Book). For a book about ghosts it has more humanity in it than many books about the living. It deserves the Newbery it won.