The novel I have been reading, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, is all about a young boy and the problems he encounters in his early life. The book starts with a scene in which a man the author refers to as “the man Jack” is creeping through the boy’s house. He swiftly murders the boy’s parents and then moves on to him, only to find that the boy has escaped from the house.

“The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly coloured bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done…”

The young boy’s name, as we later discover, is Nobody, Bod for short. Through a series of short events he finds himself in a graveyard which then becomes his home. Being brought up by ghosts, he leads an abnormal life. But eventually he is faced with the fact that he will have to leave the graveyard he has lived in all his life, and go into the real world which he is unfamiliar with.

I think the way Gaiman makes ordinary things seem so interesting is quite a good way of writing. He uses descriptive language throughout the book and also to gets into the mind of Bod very effectively to give his perspective to the reader. But as well as these good points, I found the story did not have a very drawing plot. It also disappointed me that, in the book,  the reader is never told much about the enemies Bod has and subsequently, when he defeats his enemies, it’s almost as if they never had a big enough part in the story.

I did not find this book a very compelling read: I think maybe Gaiman got the balance of description and plot slightly wrong, leading to a rather dull story. However the more sophisticated, perhaps older readers would find some of Gaiman’s writing very interesting, making a better story. Overall I think this is a book aimed at maybe slightly younger readers than myself, and this along with the points I have made above leads me to give this book 5/10.