A friend posted this article on Facebook today.
Ron Howard in talks to direct Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book
I can barely contain my glee. The Graveyard Book! As a movie! Be still my heart.
If you hadn’t realized by now, I’m a HUGE Neil Gaiman fan. OI mean, our first book to review is Good Omens. It even says “Neil Gaiman Enthusiast” on my business card. (Seriously, it does; right next to “World Traveler” and “Librarian Extraordinaire”.)
I felt I should take this time to review The Graveyard Book.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
From Amazon:
It takes a graveyard to raise a child.
Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy—an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod’s family.
I live in New York and Hurricane Sandy (Superstorm Sandy? Holy-Crap-That’s-A-Lot-of-Wind Sandy?) hit us. We were without power for five days, which suited me fine because I just read by candlelight. As it was dark and the end of October, The Graveyard Book seemed perfect.
The story itself seemed very familiar. A small child, displaced and raised by Others, watched over, episodic… I’m ashamed to say how long it took me to realize that Gaiman had modeled The Graveyard Book on The Jungle Book. That made the story so much richer! I could see all the parallels, and the otherworldly atmosphere of the graveyard was a perfect parallel to the jungle. And the characters! This realization made me love the book even more.
My mother? Didn’t like the book so much. In her own words, “It’s just so fantastical.” Yes, a book about a small child being raised by the denizens of a graveyard is too fantastical for my mother. I believe it needs to be said at this point that my mother rarely reads (don’t ask how it’s possible that a I’m the progeny of a non-reader, I’ve been wondering for years on this point), and when she does she sticks to true crime stories or horribly depressing memoirs. However, I forced her to stick with it and she couldn’t wait to find out what happened to Bod in the end. She was hooked, and loved Gaiman’s descriptive detail once she got used to it.
I’ve contended for years that Neil Gaiman isn’t an author, he’s a storyteller, a bard, a weaver of tales. He transcends “author” and makes the reader part of the story; not in the way of Stephen King, where the reader is written into the story, but in a way where the world in the tale is described so eloquently that it becomes a tangible thing.
In short, you will love this book. I’ll describe it as YA, but it’s rich and vibrant and meaty enough for even the most adult tastes. It’s also very dark, just as Coraline was, but to another level. The opening lines are, after all,
“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.”
How’s that for a hook?
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