The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman, 2008

Although I love a lot of fantasy, there's much of it I don't care for, and I'm one of those who never got into Gaiman. One comic book a year more than sates my appetite, so I didn't read The Sandman; one chapter of American Gods was plenty; and I missed Stardust. But I saw Coraline and loved it. Then librarians everywhere raved about The Graveyard Book; it won the Newbery (an award that really means something, even though it can lead to as much head-scratching as the Oscars); and most of all Gaiman gave either a great Newbery acceptance speech or a great interview (or both) in The Horn Book, my favorite literature magazine. No head-scratching here--it's a great book, a lot like Eva Ibbotsen book, but with more thought and heart.

Bod (short for Nobody) grows up in a graveyard, where the ghosts and other inhabitants shelter him from "the man Jack," who killed his family when he was a baby. The ghosts speak and think in the ways that were natural to them when they were alive, so the different time periods give texture to the dialogue. They're delightful, but the emotional center is the mysterious Silas, neither dead nor alive. He fetches Bod's food, brings in the werewolf Miss Lupescu to teach him, and eventually lets the growing Bod go to an actual human school. Bod and his supernatural family deal with the tension between safety and growth, past and future, ordinary and remarkable, with lots of plot and twists along the way. I love books like this that work on multiple levels.

My only criticism is that the illustrations are truly ugly. David McKean is a comic book artist (among many other things), which fits with Gaiman's background, but personally I don't think the distorted, black-and-gray, bleeding-off-the-page look works at all with a novel.