A Quick Tip by Count_Orlok_22

I've always been fond of slightly dark fantasy adventures about children, whether written by Lewis Carroll, Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl, or J.K. Rowling. Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is certainly of that same vein and is worthy to sit upon the bookshelf among those authors mentioned above. The novel is a Gothic coming of age story, modeled on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and tells the story of a young boy, Nobody Owens, whose family was murdered when he was a baby and as a result he grew up in a cemetery, raised by ghosts and his godfather, a vampire. The book is beautifully melancholic and contains wonderfully quirky characters and an equally sinister group of villains. Certainly, the book is reminiscent of other young adult fantasy novels (the Harry Potter series being the obvious comparison), but Gaiman is an eccentric and more than intelligent enough to avoid any cliches or to allow his characters to become two-dimensional. Here is a novel that is at once delightfully somber, but that contains all of the wonderful, awkward, and memorable moments of growing up as an outsider.