Imagine my delight on realizing this book fit the Cannonball Read requirements. Traveling is very conducive for reading: I started this yesterday in the airport, read on the plane, and finished it this morning on my friend’s front porch while I listened to her neighbor’s wind chimes. Practically perfect in every way.
The Graveyard Book is the story of Nobody Owens, called Bod, who grows up in a graveyard. The story follows him from the night of his family’s murder, and his subsequent adoption by a dead couple in the graveyard and by extension the rest of the graveyard’s residents as well, through the next fourteen years. Bod learns the ways of the dead—the Fade, the Terror—makes friends with a living girl and a long-dead one, and shows himself to be a a good boy for all his strange home life. Like Mowgli in The Jungle Book, which The Graveyard Book is modeled after, Bod also learns you can’t straddle two worlds forever. Eventually you have to choose one.
The Graveyard Book is now not only a bestseller but also a Newberry Award winner, and is a great book for older children up. It also contains the most lovely and uplifting last sentence I’ve read.
Mirrored from Jenna Jones.com.