The Graveyard Book

It's hard to find things to say about the good books. I mean, this won the Newbery a few years ago - do you even need a recommendation from me?

All I can really do is add my voice to the chorus, so here goes:

I just loved this book. It was a perfect blend of scary and magic and heart and melancholy (and yes, I know that list is poorly composed). I was wary at first because opening with a triple homicide seemed a little too In Cold Blood for a children's book, but really, I was sucked in before I had time to get too worked up about it. The illustrations were perfect, the characters fantastic...

My favorite part was a chapter called "The Danse Macabre." It pushed me over from really liking this book to kind of loving it - that chapter just cast a spell on me. I also loved the ending, which made me cry, and Gaiman's Newbery acceptance speech (in the back of the copy I was reading), which made me cry more.

This is pretty much incoherent, but I feel like I warned you at the get-go. I just can't talk about the really good books; at least, I can't be objective about them. I can sometimes talk about my experience of reading them, or identify quotes and passages that really gripped me, but I can't say much about them that is intelligent. And I'm comfortable with that. In fact, I'm downright happy that there are so many books in this world that leave me fumbling for words.