The Graveyard Book

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What a fun book!  This book pulled me in from the start, with the creepy murder scene in the first pages, to setting up the unique and original plot.  After all, have you ever heard of a story where an orphan boy is raised by ghosts and Dracula in a ramshackle graveyard? Great potential there, if you ask me.  I liked the tension between Bod's life among the dead and his potential as a living, breathing human being, and how he must reconcile that throughout his childhood.  His parents, friends and mentors are all ghosts, and for his safety he can't leave the graveyard for now, yet he is undeniably different.  I liked best how the scene of dancing the Macabre illustrated his "otherness," his position as being part of the dead community while being quite alive.  It was so whimsical and magical for both parties, but Bod was the only one who could relish it from both perspectives.  When talking to Silas one day about death and after commenting on how death wouldn't be so bad because all of his best friends are dead, Silas says this: "Yes. They are.  And they are, for the most part, done with the world.  You are not. You're alive, Bod.  That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.  If you change the world, the world will change.  Potential.  Once you're dead, it's gone.  Over.  You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name.  You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished." (pg 179) I loved this speech.  How often do we forget our potential?  Our potential to change, to create, to dream?  Do we sometimes figuratively find ourselves walking among the dead and losing sight of who we are and who we are meant to become?  Being in Young Women's the past few years I came to love the value Divine Nature and I gained a strong conviction that we must not forgot, as Sister Dalton put it, who we are and who's we are.

Back to the book - as much as I loved the premise, the resolution left me wanting.  Sure, the whole scene with Jack and Scarlett and the Sleer in the cave was exciting (I almost missed my flight while I was in the thick of reading it), but then Jack was gone and there was a bit of a let down.  Especially with Scarlett fading out of Bod's life just like that afterwards.  And then, just a year later, the graveyard kicks him out?  He had nothing to go to, nothing to look forward to, yet the author says he leaves excited for his adventures among the living?  All I felt was terror for this young man setting off on his own to face a world he had spent very little time in, with no one to guide him through it. 

So that's my review - a great book overall, really fun premise and subtle message about our potential, but a bit of a let down at the end.  What did you think?