The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

If you come to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevances - p113

Picture that.  Seriously!  Somehow the paragraph got me laughing out loud.

It's post - Halloween (by 10 days or so) and I'm posting an entry which fits the occasion though late.  I guess by now it's not a surprise if I were to say that the book was read in early September LAST YEAR.  I haven't been updating my reads for the longest time.  So I'm now depending on my scribbles on the small multicolored (in this occasion they are in bright orange) notepads to remind me of the story.  What I've got so far apart from the paragraph above is that story is about a boy (named Bod short for NoBODy Owen) who was raised by ghosts in the cemetery.  As a toddler, he found his adopted ghost parents & guardians (or was it the ghosts found him?) when he escaped murder in his own house which killed his parents.

There are many interesting ghostly characters in the story.  Many whom initially appear to be scary but actually are good hearted.  But few are soulless downright scary) too.  And how sometimes the real (outside the graveyard compound) world is more dangerous for a growing up boy.  Particularly when there's someone or something out there wants to kill you when you are still a baby.  In many fantasy children's book there's always a character or two (whether willingly or not) that kinda look after the young protagonist and in this story its Silas (like Dumbledore or Hagrid in looking out for Harry Porter).  So Silas trained Bod or granted him special powers to allow him to embrace the graveyard as his home and introduce him to other 'tutors' to prepare him for the outside world.

You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.

This is my first book by Neil Gaiman.  I knew about him after after watching Caroline which to me was pretty scary.  This was an okay book for me.  I'm not really drawn to any of the characters.  Anyways I like the idea of the story.  See how you like it.