“If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”įirst, Neil Gaiman’s writing is absolutely stunning.

I didn’t have any errands to run to justify car-listening like I usually do, so I literally talked myself into cleaning just so I had a good excuse to listen to this book. I’ve struggled with Gaiman’s work in the past, but this was my first time trying out his middle grade work or an audiobook format of one of his stories, and I’m not sure which of those details (or maybe both!) contributed to the outcome, but it was incredible. “You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Since that obviously never quite worked out for me as a child, it only makes sense that I would eventually pick up The Graveyard Book to live vicariously through Nobody Owens. Įven as a child, I’ve always been obsessed with ghosts and cemeteries, and despite the fact that I would have been terrified, I remember having this idea that it would have been so cool(!) to just move my whole family to a graveyard and live surrounded by spirits and ghouls and whatever other sort of lovely non-living things one might find therein. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will be in danger from the man Jack – who has already killed Bod’s family. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy – an ancient indigo man, a gateway to abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible fleer.

He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. RELEASED: September 30th, 2008 HarperCollins

The graveyard book author