The Facts
Length: 307 pages.
Publisher: HarperCollins.
This is Gaiman's eighth novel in Young Adult Fiction.
Quick Summary
Cryptic man Jack (the name "man Jack" is kept up throughout the novel; if you've read Gaiman before, you'll notice he likes this kind of repetition) kills an entire family except the baby, who climbs to apparent safety inside a graveyard. The inhabitants of this place - dead witches, dead doctors, dead teachers, werewolves, vampires, et cetera - protect the child, Nobody "Bod" Owens, through his journey towards adulthood. The novel is told of a kind of vignette/chapter-style breaking up of things; it reminded me of T.H.White's The Sword in the Stone.
The story is told in third-person.
The Good
What isn't good? Gaiman manages to get creepy correct right in the first few lines of the novel. The man Jack's just torn through Nobody's family, but it's the knife wielded that gets all the attention (it "had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet"). The reality of the murder just gets me - an entire family decimated before the novel even began.
Gaiman seems to capture reality through unreality - working through the realm of fantasy and myth and half-remembered dreams in order to write about something we all feel. I mean, who doesn't fall in love with the ghost-witch Liza Hempstock, in all her plainness, and feel the pain when the romance between her and Nobody can never really develop?
Hell, I still get texts from ghosts.
The Questionable
Gaiman definitely has set out his realm, and through that, somewhat of a style. And the thing is he never really changes. Fantasy/reality (Gaiman is the version of the "magical realism" genre, or fantastical reality, or whatever) is where he rests. It's a great style, but there's a little lack of surprise that I find myself wanting. Maybe I just haven't read enough Gaiman.
On a related note, another thing I wasn't too keen on were the antagonists. The shadowy organisation of ne'er-do-wellers just seems rather blank and flat. The main man Jack doesn't change at all - he's still the same at the end of the novel as he is in the beginning, albeit with white hair instead of black. Furthermore, he's easily fooled: the first chapter highlights his nonchalance at murder, but then almost makes a fool out of him when he loses, of all things, a baby. I remembered, when I was reading, the commentary from Joss Whedon during the Serenity film - he had deleted a scene because he felt like he was making too much of an idiot organisation of "The Alliance." I felt Whedon's words here. The Knaves are intelligent and surprising and evil and ingenuousness, but you never see evidence of it.
The Good
It's tragic, really. The novel has a - whoops, spoilers - happy ending, as all YA fiction probably should, but throughout the novel there are two premises which Gaiman continually reminds us of: one, that Nobody's entire family has been brutally murdered, and two, that Bod, being "alive", can never be fully integrated into his graveyard home. He's stuck between two worlds. And sure, that's been done before, especially in YA fiction, but I haven't ever seen it as effectively delivered throughout the entire novel as in here.
It's haunting (pun intended).
Final Thoughts
Do you like Gaiman? Read it. Have you never read Gaiman before? Read it.
Are you tired of Gaiman? Don't. Does your child still not know what suicide, or murder is, and you don't feel like explaining? Don't (get it for them).
But all in all, it won't cost you much time. I read GB in just over a day. A quick read compared to what I'm used to - heavy Victorian lit - but still well worth the time, in my opinion.
Arbitrary Score: 4.0 out of 5.
Next book: Cross Currents, by John Shors (2011)
