The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

Ghastly, Ghostly, Gruesome, Great!

Who loaned me this book? Robin? Tom-El? Whoever it was, I thank you. The Graveyard Book is the first thing I've read by juvenile fiction writer Neil Gaiman (whose name looks like caiman, a kind of crocodile), but it will not be the last. This book was justifiably given the Newbury medal for excellence in children's literature.

The pen and ink art is gorgeous
and evocative. The art program
adds an amazing amount of
atomsphere.

I found this book in a side pocket of my suitcase when I was unpacking at a Youthbuild gathering in Kentucky. Surrounded by trees on a mountainside near Hazard, I took every chance to be peacefully by myself and, as it turned out, reading. The Youthbuild gathering was terrific, but it was the quiet time that meant the most to me. Hundreds of birds singing, the hum of ceiling fans on a huge screened porch...in this alternative world, I was easily drawn into Gaiman's eerie otherness.

The Graveyard Book is set in--guess where--a graveyard. A toddler whose parents are murdered wanders away through a door left open by the killer and ends up in the graveyard late at night, when the ghosts are out going about their nightly business. The ghosts take the toddler under their protection and decide to raise him as one of their own. (Gaiman says that he modeled this book on Kipling's Jungle Book, in which a child is raised by jungle animals, but I thought most of Harry Potter.)

Gaiman presents the ghostly community straight on...doesn't need to justify it or explain it. He sort of made me wonder why I ever thought ghosts did NOT live perfectly interesting lives at night. Dry (as bones) humor saturates the text, especially when the ghosts are referred to by what is on their tombstones, as in, "He went down the hill at a run, a ten-year-old boy in a hurry, going so fast he almost tripped over Digby Poole (1795-1860, As I Am So Shall You Be), righting himself by effort of will."

The oldest tomb in Bod's cemetery is an ancient
barrow, which figures ominously in the plot.

The toddler, named Nobody Owens, grows up with spectral tutors and protectors. He learns to read by deciphering the tombstones. Some types of ghosts can leave the graveyard, and those bring him food. In fact, there are many kinds of ghosts and otherwise undead creatures looking out for Bod, as he is called, reminiscent of the Harry Potter stories. And some of them are on the lookout for the person/entity who killed Bod's family (Graveyard's Voldemort).

Graveyard stays pretty light, as Bod gets into and out of trouble. The chapters are funny in themselves, and actually charming, a word I don't use too often. Any fourth grader and up will enjoy them just as cool ghost stories.

However, quite subtly and unawares, Bod gathers knowledge that will help him protect himself when the murderer returns. It is subtle because I didn't realize it until the crisis occurred...it was not telegraphed. Bod collects specific knowledge of stories, languages of the dead, and sacred objects like amulets. The story does get a bit grim toward the end, as Bod and the ghosts cope with a group of attackers. The attackers are not treated gently or kindly.

The graveyard gates have kept Bod's enemies
out--but will it keep him in forever?

A major theme in this book is whether Bod will ever get to live outside the safety of the graveyard. Several times he seeks to stay forever, without really understanding what death is. In the end, he chooses to leave. This echoes wonderfully the developmental crises of adolescence (which some of us never get over)--the approach of independence and the avoidance thereof. Somehow, the child must feel both safe and strong to go forth, and must want to explore a wider world. Children thrown out without the sense of safety, strength, and curiosity will fail. The graveyard world is a security blanket; and Bod resists the measures taken to prepare him to leave, such as the education he receives.

I recommend this terrific book. The language is not difficult (except for names). It is imaginative and interesting, fast-paced, at times ecstatic, and utterly accepting of death, which oddly bequeaths the joy in the book.

Graveyards

Since I've been researching family ancestry in the past few months, I feel an amazing affinity for graveyards. They are the holders of record, the names, the dates, the "daughter of," the "loving mother and wife," the "Grand Army of the Republic, 1864." If you can get to the stones before they weather away, they will give up great information, carefully hoarded information. Chuck Wallace and I met in a local graveyard the other day, to let our dogs roam (with poop bags ready, of course). This graveyard is so old that the graves are undecorated, tilted, worn. Still, Chuck took me to his favorite stone--one in which a misspelled word is carefully repaired by the carver. What a crisis it must have been in a time of grief to discover this egregious and disrespectful error! Who was responsible for getting it fixed? Was the stone carver ever after shunned?

Liz I is a primary marker of history for me. Was
an ancestor alive before, during, or after her
reign? Was the ancestor a contemporary of
William Shakespeare?

In genealogy, finding the grave marker is a major discovery. It makes the ancestor physically real, even as it marks his or her passage into physical non-reality. I have followed the lives and deaths of so many ancestors. The simple data says so much--the historical context of the birth and death years: what was happening at that time? Was she born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I? Did he die before or after Columbus arrived in the Americas? Many of my forebears were English Puritans, arriving in America between 1620 and 1650, a time of religious upheaval and persecution in England. Many others migrated to Ohio from the east between 1780 and 1820, probably claiming land grants as payment for service in the American Revolution.

A map of a cemetery

Birth records are evocative. How many children did the women have? How many of the children lived less that five years? Did a woman have children every year? How old was she when she married? How old was her husband? What kind of life was that?

Fortunately (except for those of you bored stiff by this genealogy stuff), graveyards are quite well-documented. People have marked locations and copied off information. We DO know where the bodies are buried! And me? I don't know. Now that cremation is getting more popular, it is likely that my final resting place will be unmarked. I will end up like one of Gaiman's characters, unsanctified, forgotten. The only beauty will be that I will not be around to find out!

Reflections of a Blogger on Blogging

The author at her "day" job

I'm Joy Dickerson and I'm a kid's lit blogger. I've been a kid-lit junky my whole life and I love it. No apologies. Blogging about kid's lit gives it shape and form for me and strengthens the bond. I appreciate my readers.


Children's literature is an all-or-nothing type of love. I love children's literature and enjoy sampling broadly in the various genres. But if you don't like children's literature, POOF!, it doesn't exist for you. You can go decades without thinking about it until some particular title goes viral among the young and you see it everywhere--like Harry Potter and Hunger Games. You're now aware of it, but you still don't read it. Well, I do read it.


Two major themes I monitor in the material I read are gender roles and the hero journey. I'm always looking for books in which all characters may properly develop their potential independent of societal norms--and they are few and far between. Even the vaunted Hunger Games can't figure out what to do with Katniss's sexuality--and she's a great character. It's fun in the Hunger Games trilogy to see the men's lives revolve around Katniss and her instabilities.

One of the best adult books
I've ever read.

The hero journey is wonderful to track. Even lame books can have great evocations of the hero journey, or the movement through certain rites of passage to true adulthood. The hero journey subtext is one of the elements of children's literature that draws me back again and again. And it is pretty much lacking in most adult literature.


And I can vouch for the fact that people lacking idyllic childhoods can retain a love of children's literature. We're not all starry-eyed elementary school teachers (like my sister Robin, lol). I know for myself that I still have developmental issues to explore, and children's literature explores them. Would you rather be liked or right? Can a society without individuality succeed? What is family? How do you define courage? Are some people expendable? What if there is no happy ending? How do you grow up and still retain a sense of magic? Why do humans do so much suffering? Why are people cruel? Easy to be hard easy to say no...


I actually wonder if children's literature is read more by adults than children. Is it secretly a subgenre of adult literature? Kid's lit is not for the illiterate or faint of heart--it is as filled with tragedy and sometimes the reading level is surprisingly high. Hunger Games is a good example of a young adult novel filled with death, poignancy, and sophisticated structure and language.

One of the best children's
novels I've ever read

I have been blessed by my Eager Reader's Best of the Best list (http://www.eagerreaders.com). It has included classics like The Count of Monte Cristo, Pride and Prejudice, and David Copperfield, as well as picture books, Dr. Seuss, cartoons, and books aimed at every age of child (including those thick-cardboard baby books). I've also read lots of science fiction, which I love. (Even adult science fiction is really for the juvenile in us all.) The list is skewed, of course, and is a bit long in the tooth. I agreed to read every book on it as a dare to myself--could I sustain this goal over a long period of time? What value would I gain from it. Well, I have gained a huge amount of value...I have put myself in touch with something larger than myself. Blogging has given me a forum into which I may share even the stupidest of my opinions and openly own them. Blogging has brought meaning to my writing. I want to thank my sister Robin and my nephew Jake for the support and prodding that moved me into this adventure, this hero journey of my own.


The Blogging Process


I am more read than I ever was before--957 readings, at the current moment. I know that probably 1/3 of the hits were in error or by non-human entities and phishing schemes, but that still leaves nearly 700 legitimate hits. What does this mean? It doesn't mean I'm popular--many blogs get tons more hits. To some extent it means that my friends and relatives are indulgent and dutifully go to the blog to look at new entries whether they are interested or not. OK, let's take another third off for that. Now I'm at 300 legitamate look-sees. I think that's pretty respectable, given the limited topic (mostly children's and some adult literature reviews) and lack of bells and whistles (still can't figure out how to embed a film clip).

The author at a quilt show.

Blogging is fun. I enjoy the reading, writing, thinking, designing, and researching that goes into each of my posts. I love putting the pieces together. Blogging combines the things I love the most. Most of my blog posts have been positive reviews...I'm more interested in saying what's in the book, what the book brings to the table, so to speak. I will occasionally condemn a book, but that's rare.


I check my blog stats several times a day. The stats page keeps track of number of hits, which post was read, where the hit came from geographically, and where the hit came from on the 'net. As of this writing, I've had 957 hits across 41 posts from every continent except Antarctica (and, unless penguins learn to read, I don't see that changing) and from innumerable and undecipherable Internet sources. I post new blog entries on average of one per week on Facebook and Linked In. I especially love the little map on which the countries turn green if I've had a hit from them and get greener with as hits rack up. I like the "All Time" button--the planet glows with patches of green.


Thanks for reading. Thanks for greening my planet through literature. And keep on hitting my blog.

Mockingjay & the Trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

If you have not read Mockingjay, please cut the two-page epilogue from the book and burn it before reading. This Happy Ending Device trivializes all three of the books that have gone before and insults the intelligence of the reader. I can't believe Collins fell victim to the same Happy Ending pressures that felled J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. And they all lived happily ever after...after unspeakable trauma, the epilogues of both series are crushingly bad. I have removed these pages from my copy of Mockingjay.

YouTube has many videos of Suzanne Collins, including this one of her reading the first chapter of Mockingjay:  http://youtu.be/1MY6yEt6aZs

I finished Mockingjay a few days ago and I feel confused--as confused as our hero Katniss feels most of the time. The amount of death and violence in this book makes Hunger Games and Catching Fire seem mild. Yet, I kept reading and felt compelled to do so. I am disturbed that I liked such violent books so much. And I am disturbed with the duality of Katniss's role. She flips like a coin in the air from ingenue beauty queen sweetheart to hard-bodied killing machine soldier.

Where is Katniss herself in this pink/black dichotomy? That's the question that kept me going. How would Katniss survive this role whiplash? I have felt this so many times (especially in adolescence)--that the choices presenting themselves don't fit me at all and yet I am forced to choose one. As I discussed in my blog on Catching Fire, it is the fact that these books are psychology evocative that makes them so good. I have many times felt the hate and blackness and helplessness and coercion. The images that I have searched for to represent these feelings have been violent and black. (I wrote a poem titled "Birth of the Baby of Death"!)

A scruffy tiger cat helps humanize this book.
I could write a complete essay on the cat's
role in the story.

Mockingjay finishes out Collins's trilogy. Katniss is still on her feet, physically safe, but filled with guilt, horror, and anger. She is turned into a public relations device for the districts' uprising against the Capitol, a pawn who once again is manipulated into unthinkable relationships with unspeakable horror. And the reader shares the impact of all of this with Katniss. She struggles to maintain her humanity in the face of her own participation in every level of coercion and violence. I won't go into detail about the plot...it's a war story.

I loved Katniss. I wanted to help her. I wanted to see her survive somehow, some way, somewhere. My engagement with her was one of the key factors in keeping me reading through to the end. Her fate became entwined with mine--if she could find a way to keep going, I guess I can. When I imagine what I would have thought of these books if I had read them 35 years ago, I see my teenage self clinging to these books, keeping them by my bed, valuing their reflection of my inner turmoil.

And truly, if you want to step way, way back and get all metaphysical, these books can be viewed as a hero journey for the adolescent. Adolescence can be seen as a lengthy battle for identity, autonomy, value, perspective, and wisdom. Adolescence is a fight like Katniss fights.

And, of course, these battles never really end as I grow into middle age, but I have more tools and strategies now, and nothing inside me is as serious as it was then. The important things are outside me now. And Katniss finds out what we all sort of find out (or should)--that sometimes evil is not punished, sometimes wrongs are unrighted, and many questions go unanswered. Loving anyway is what comes out of the struggle. Loving yourself anyway, loving another person, loving life anyway. Emerge from the flames and ashes still able to love.

The Hunger Games trilogy is impressive and strong. Even with all the violence and torment, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend these books. They have some strong truth in them.

Much useful information at this site, including summaries, character lists, study guides, and other resources on this trilogy:  http://www.gradesaver.com/author/suzanne-collins/