Boen asked for something scary for bedtime reading (yeah, I know, the kids wants to be scared), so I picked The Graveyard Book despite it not being scary because it at least had a scary name.
The Graveyard Book is Gaiman's riff on The Jungle Book, and it starts with Nobody Owens, a lone survivor of a grisly serial killer who murdered the rest of the family. He gets adopted by the local graveyard, and is brought up by a combination of ghosts and other night monsters. He's given freedom of the graveyard and brought up by a family of ghosts and eventually enters the world and confronts his family's killer.
The book is episodic in nature, so you can stop at every chapter and pick it up with no memory of the previous chapter (other than the over acing plot), which makes it work for bed time reading. The writing is transparent, and the situations somewhat interesting. Boen was definitely not scared by any of the events in the book, though he didn't pay enough attention to figure out who Nobody's guardian actually was.
The book is fun, but definitely not up to par with Gaiman's The Sandman. I have to say, though that's a high bar to meet, since other than Stardust, I'm not sure there's anything Gaiman's produced in prose form that holds a candle to his work in graphic novels.
Nevertheless, even mediocre Gaiman is not a boring read. Recommended.
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