“Thursday or as I like to call it ‘Day 4 of the hostage situation.’”
We’ve made it to Thursday. Hallelujah! That’s cause for celebration or at the very least, reason enough to share a riddle? Johnny’s mother had three children. The first was named April and the second was named May. What was the name of the third child? If you’re tired like me, maybe you had to think about it. Chances are you knew it was Johnny. But that’s not the real riddle on my brain. Here’s a teaser: There is a haunt of a book that won the Newberry Medal and the Carnegie Medal, the first time both named the same work. Throw in the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Audio Book of the Year nearly a decade ago and which throwback jewel have you got?
If nothing or Nobody comes to mind, then you’re on the right track. Quite frankly, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is spectacular. His imagination gets A pluses all around for conjuring up a runaway toddler who heads into a graveyard to escape his family’s grisly murderer. Fortunately, supernatural residents agree to raise the young orphan they named Nobody Owens—Bod for short. In the sprawling graveyard-turned-home, Bod is educated by the dead. I particularly loved when he visited the dead poet who was as melodramatic as he was forgotten by the living. Bod’s grim adventures are guaranteed to captivate and delight readers big and small. I completely agree with the smart reviewer who said, “How Gaiman has managed to combine fascinating, friendly, frightening and fearsome in one fantasy I shall never know, but he has pulled it off magnificently.” And that, my friends, is no joke.
P.S. Gaiman’s audible reading of this novel was like perfectly whipped buttercream icing on a Duff Goldman cake.