This past Monday morning, ALA Book Awards were announced and Neil Gaiman won the Newbery Medal, the top annual prize for young adult fiction. Gaiman is a leading science fiction and comics writer and has won the Hugo award three times.
The Graveyard Book is now available and in stock at the Book Beat. It has won accolades from across the kid-lit spectrum. Fuse #8 blog commented: “I once heard someone postulate that maybe Neil Gaiman wrote it just so that he could play with the sentence “It takes a graveyard to raise a child.†Unlikely. Fun, but unlikely. I mean, he does make a casual allusion that isn’t far off from that phrase, but he never goes whole hog. This book doesn’t feel like it was written to back up a joke. It feels like a book written by a parent with children growing up and moving out. It’s a title that tips its hat to kids making their way in the world, their pasts behind them, their futures unknown. This is not yet another silly little fantasy novel, but something with weight and depth. The fact that it just happens to be loads of fun to boot is simply a nice bonus. Highly recommended.”
The seed for this story of an 18-month-old orphaned boy who escapes his family’s killer and takes refuge in a nearby cemetery was planted when his own toddler-age son used the graveyard across the street from their home as a playground, the author told his audience at BEA’s Children’s Book and Author Breakfast in Los Angeles last year. He described the tale as a kind of twist on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, in which the boy is raised by ghosts rather than animals.
“”The Graveyard Book manages the remarkable feat of playing delightful jazz riffs on Kipling’s classic Jungle Books. One might call this book a small jewel, but in fact it’s much bigger within than it looks from the outside.” — Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn
The following interview appeared in “Shelf Talker”:
Neil Gaiman: ‘Children’s Fiction Can Change the World’
Neil Gaiman is having a good week. On Monday morning, in the midst of promoting the movie inspired by his book Coraline, which releases February 6, he received a phone call from Rose Trevino, chair of the Newbery committee. The Graveyard Book had won the 2009 Newbery Medal. Gaiman has called the novel a twist on Kipling’s The Jungle Book, except that hero Nobody Owens is “somebody who gets raised by dead people” instead of animals, and “Bod” is mentored by a man called Silas, who is not quite like the other ghosts.
All day long in Denver on Monday, librarians were twittering about Gaiman’s tweets of “delighted swearing,” as he puts it in his blog. You may follow his tweets on Twitter.com, his blog entry of the Newbery call, and watch him reading aloud The Graveyard Book (Gaiman is especially pleased with the crowd’s reaction midway through chapter 7, “Every Man Jack,” where he had to stop at a cliffhanger). Tuesday, he appeared on the Today Show. Shelf Awareness spoke with Gaiman yesterday while he was en route to the airport to fly back to Los Angeles.
If memory serves, you wrote Coraline late at night, about 20 minutes at a clip, at the same time that you were writing American Gods.
That’s very true. I started it many years before, the idea was this was the project I was doing “on my own time,” and then we moved to America, and I ran out of “my own time”–it no longer existed. I sent [what I had] to my editor, Jennifer Hershey, and she said, “It’s amazing, what happens next?” And I said, “Why don’t you send me a contract, and we’ll both find out.” And she did, bless her. But the problem was I didn’t have any more time, so I decided that instead of reading 10 pages before bed, I’d write half a page. I started [Coraline] for Holly, who’s now 23, and finished it for Maddy, and she’s now 14.
Was Coraline your first book for children?
It was my first novel for children, technically, but in reality when I was 20 or 21, I wrote my very first book, and it was a children’s book. I sent it, I think, to Penguin, and they wrote back with an encouraging note, I put it in the attic and forgot about it. After Coraline and Wolves [The Wolves in the Walls] came out I was reading to my daughter Maddy every night and I remember I went to the attic, found it, read it to Maddy, and then put it back in the attic where it will stay until I’m dead.
You’ve said The Graveyard Book was inspired by your then 18-month-old son riding his tricycle in your neighborhood cemetery. Was there a specific gate in that cemetery that inspired the ghoul-gate?
The ghoul-gate was inspired by a grave I found in Cornwall about two-and-a-half years ago. I’d taken a little cottage with no wireless, no Internet, and I wrote [chapters] two and three there, “The New Friend” and “The Hounds of God.” In the little town of Redroof, I drove past a cemetery and wandered around, and there was one grave that was funghoid–it had a statue, but the statue no longer looked like an angel but rather like a giant fungus. There was a crack down the middle as if something had been trying to get out; it looked like an opening to somewhere. The line wandered through my head, “There’s a ghoul-gate in every graveyard.”
I loved that Silas tells Bod that he was worse than Bloody Jack (the man who murdered Bod’s family), yet Silas is completely sympathetic. Did you name him for Silas Marner?
I don’t think so. Some characters turn up with names, and some don’t–the ones who don’t, you spend an awfully long time worrying about their names. The boy in the graveyard was someone I’d wondered about for 20-odd years. Then I ran into that line, “Rattle his bones/ Over the stones/ It’s only a pauper/ Who nobody owns.” Whereas Silas was Silas from the moment he walked onto the page.
Before Monday morning, did you know what a Newbery Medal was?
Oh of course! When I was eight years old maybe I picked up my Puffin copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and I loved it enough that it registered as a Newbery. In the years that followed, I read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh; From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Lloyd Alexander’s The Prydain Chronicles, because they won the Newbery. So yes, I never imagined it would be an award that it would be my lot to ever take home. I’m awed by it.
So what do you think about children’s books?
They’re terrible; they should be banned. What kind of question is that? I think they’re wonderful. When I was a kid, I was a kid with a book. As far as I was concerned, had you asked me at the age of seven what the most important things in the world are, I’d probably say the first six Narnia books, the first three Mary Poppins books. . . . Had I discovered The Hobbit yet? Not yet. The books that took pride of place on my shelves were Stig of the Dump by Clive King, Tales of Ancient Egypt by Roger Lancelyn Green. I was the kind of kid who, during my summer holidays, would persuade my parents to drop me off at the library in the morning, and I’d spend my day there. Sometimes I’d pack a lunch. At 6:30 when they closed, I’d walk home.
Children’s fiction, for me back then, was the most important thing there is. It has a holy place and position that adult fiction doesn’t have. Adult fiction is a wonderful thing and enriching to the soul and mind, and it takes you to great places. But children’s fiction can change the world and give you a refuge from the intolerable. It can give you a place of safety and show you the world is not bounded by the world you live in–there’s more than that.–Jennifer M. Brown