Three star review, originally posted here on November 23rd, 2024.
Dude, I don’t know. I just don’t know what to make of this book. Just… sigh… huh? This is my second time attempting to read a Neil Gaiman book (first was American Gods) that, at first blush, SEEMS like it should be right up my alley. What a charming premise! A boy raised in a graveyard! What fun! How creepy-yet-charming! This book is also supposedly for younger readers (which I erroneously thought would make it a fast read), and has a bunch of awards (which I erroneously thought would mean it’s good enough to draw me in.) I thought I would voraciously race right through it. And yet… This book just didn’t do it for me. Why not?
I think, at the core, it’s the story itself. The story was very dumb. That’s basically it.
I understand the premise- that each chapter is a stand-alone tale, and that they together form the story of our protagonist’s early life (just like Jungle Book). But the individual stories were relatively weak. And the overall story was super weak. It just made no sense. Why is there this underground world? What is this great battle happening? Huh? The whole thing was just silly.
All that being said, this book still had plenty going for it. I liked the imagination behind it, to a point. I particularly liked the world building within the graveyard community, and most of the graveyard residents. I like the idea of Bod learning some ghosting skill like disappearance. I liked the friendship he developed with the normal human girl. I think if we had remained more focused on Bod and his growing pains within the graveyard, this book would have been great. Exploring how anyone expects Bod to successfully transition to and survive in the real world some more would have been welcome. But the weird wider tales about bad guys named jack and underground monsters or whatever the hell was happening (clearly that stuff didn’t leave much of an impression on me as I can’t even remember what was going on there) jumped the demon shark for me.
Helga without the H 