The Graveyard Book

I have been wanting to read this YA book by Neil Gaiman for quite some time so it also went into the Powell's basket last weekend when I was on a sponsored shopping spree. A toddler is awakened by a noise downstairs and so clambers out of his crib, down the stairs, through the open front door, and up the hill to an historic graveyard. The cause of his disturbance is a murderer dispatching his parents and older sister and who is now hunting for him. As the child wanders into the locked graveyard he begins to see and hear things--ghosts--although he doesn't know that. Still the long dead take pity on the child and just as they are trying to decide what to do, the newly dead spirits of his parents appear and beseech them to protect the boy from the man seeking to kill him. The guardian Silas, neither dead nor alive, distracts the killer who has followed his keen sense of smell in pursuit of his prey and the dead meanwhile vote to let the Owens couple take the child on. Silas agrees to be the child's guardian until he is no longer needed for he can move back and forth between the world of the dead and that of the living in order to meet the boy's needs for food and clothing. And so begins the most unorthodox upbringing of Nobody Owens, who lives almost exclusively with the dead until he becomes a young man and decides he wants to go to school. In defending the victimized younger children at school, he becomes noticed and, as Silas has said many times, danger is waiting. The hunter befriends a friend of Bod's (short for Nobody) and finds where he has been hiding all these years. He is accompanied by other members of the Convocation who sanctioned the murder of Bod's family all those years ago. But Bod has learned some tricks that he can use to defend himself and the graveyard from these evil men, thus eliminating the imminent threat. Silas decides it is time for Bod to make his own life and sends him off to create his own adventures. This is a very endearing story that gives a new meaning to the phrase, "it takes a village to raise a child."