Two nights ago I had the very great privilege of hearing Neil Gaiman read a portion of his new book, The Graveyard Book. Since he read the first half of Chapter 7 and ended with an enormous cliffhanger, I naturally had to rush out the next day and buy the book so that I could find out what happened next.

I loved this book. It's the story of a young boy who is adopted by the dead in a graveyard after his family are murdered. He is given the name Nobody (because he looks like nobody) and called Bod for short. The story is a reworking of Kipling's Jungle Books, and Gaiman does a wonderful job taking the classic elements of those stories and changing them to fit the graveyard setting. There are a great many nods to the original hidden in the descriptive language, and the way in which so many elements of the story are both strange and familiar makes it a pleasure to read.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it is so unlike anything else typically offered to readers in its target age range, which is roughly late elementary school through junior high. It is clever and exciting, full of action and adventure, yet it is at heart about all the important things- life and death, truth and friendship and love, good and evil- without ever becoming pedantic or dogmatic. This book confirms me in my opinion that Gaiman is one of the best writers writing today. If you've never read anything by him, go and do so immediately.