Recently Read: The Graveyard Book

I read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book for my Children's Literature course. We have to read two books from a selection in our text book for eight different genres. I read this for one of my fantasy books. I picked this one to read for my course because I already owned it and planned on reading it before I knew I could read it for my course.

This book is a loose retelling of The Jungle Book.Instead of being raised by animals in the jungle, Bod, the main character whose name is Nobody Owens, is raised in a graveyard by ghosts and a vampire just happens to be his guardian. The characters in this novel are very interesting and well developed. The story is laced with bits of humor and it is fun to try to connect events or characters to Kipling's original story.

This novel also features sporadically placed black and white illustrations which add to the eerie atmosphere of the story. I have recently been really enjoying young adult and middle grade books with illustrations in them. 

This was my first Neil Gaiman book. I own Stardust and Fragile Things, which is a short story collection, by him as well. After reading this I do plan to read more of Gaiman's young adult work and I am also curious about his adult work as well. One thing about Gaiman's work that I appreciate is that he always puts little clues in his introduction or acknowledgements that give insight into where this idea originated and who inspired him to keep going. I know the introduction to his short story collection I own contains a short paragraph for each short story that give similar information.