The Graveyard Book is a children’s book — probably most appropriate for readers in the 10-13 year-old range — which pays an homage to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. A young boy’s family is murdered in the night by the mysterious man Jack, but the boy slips away to the nearby graveyard. The ghosts who reside in the graveyard agree to take the boy in and raise him, safe and hidden away from the world of people, while the undead figure Silas will act as his guardian. They christen the boy “Nobody,” or Bod for short. Each chapter of the book is episodic and pretty much self-contained, relating an incident in Bod’s childhood as he learns the ways of the dead. But everything he learns will serve him well when the Jacks finally hunt him down.

As it is a children’s book, The Graveyard Book may not be entirely satisfactory to adult readers. I myself would love to see another novel for adults featuring some of the same characters, such as Silas. But The Graveyard Book is wonderfully written and entirely absorbing nonetheless, a fantasy that will transport all readers to the hidden world Gaiman creates in the overgrown, forgotten graveyard where ghosts turn out to be quite ordinary people really (but watch out for the ghouls!). Ultimately, this is a universal story as well, a classic coming-of-age tale, with a bittersweet ending as Bod inevitably must leave his childhood behind. This is going in my son’s library, and I will enjoy reading it aloud to him when he is old enough.

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