The Graveyard Book

Gaiman, Neil. (2008). The graveyard book. New York: HarperCollins.


Nobody Owens’ life changed forever when his family was brutally murdered and he found himself adopted by a graveyard family.  Nobody has the ability to see and speak to the dead. While the graveyard does its best to protect Bod, he longs for the outside world with other people who are alive.  So as a teenager, he finally decides to become part of this outside world, to learn from it, and hopefully, to locate and end the man who took his family from him.
 
Evaluative Criteria: Setting and Theme

Setting: The story takes place in a small town graveyard.  The author does a fantastic job in creating an image with only words. We can picture the graveyard as we are reading the story. Bod embraces the graveyard as his home. Bod is experiencing things that other kids his age will never understand or experience themselves. While they are doing “normal things”, Bod is talking with the dead, and befriending ghosts. Throughout the book the consistency of the dark and eerie feeling can be felt.

Theme:  A theme we see throughout the story is a theme of kindness. We can see this when Nobody is taken in by Mrs. Owens. Not only does she take him in she makes sure he becomes part of the family unit. We see kindness again when Liza and Nobody meet he is kind and compassionate enough to construct her a gravestone so will not be forgotten. Finally we see kindness again when Bod helps some students stand up to some bullies.   So the theme is obvious throughout the book.