Saturday 13 June 2015

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

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Book Blurb (From Goodreads) 
After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family . . . 

Beloved master storyteller Neil Gaiman returns with a luminous new novel for the audience that embraced his New York Times bestselling modern classic Coraline. Magical, terrifying, and filled with breathtaking adventures, The Graveyard Book is sure to enthrall readers of all ages.
My Review
Neil Gaimon is defiantly one of the most unique writers that I have ever seen, and The Graveyard Book is the first book that I have ever read by him. 
The plot in this book was slow at the beginning since it followed Bod as he was growing up and the adventures that he has in the graveyard. The first half of the book was more centered around him growing up and learning about the outside world. However, in the second half of the book you start to get more answers to the questions which have been hanging around since the beginning of the book and there are some characters that come back to move the plot along, it is around here that the plot really starts to get interesting. Each chapter at the beginning followed separate adventures that Bod has over the years but the last ones follow on after the other without any time gaps to string together the story. 
Bod was an interesting character to read about since we got to know him so well. We were first introduced to him when he was a baby and since then we watched him grow-up in the graveyard with ghosts as his tutors. He made a lot of mistakes over the years, some of which were harder to fix then others, but they all brought on more character development for him. He is an intelligent boy who also has an interesting way of thinking. The conversations that he had with some people when he was five years old, defiantly did not seem like the kind of conversations that a five year old should be having. Mainly because the language the he was using was almost to fluent for a five year old, but maybe that was just the writing style. Bod manages to also make some interesting friends, some of which are ghosts and others are actually living people, which I enjoyed reading about and I wish that I could f learned a little bit more about some of them. 
Finally, I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.

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