Every year adult librarians decide on the best illustrated children’s book of the year (the Caldecott) and the best novel (the Newbery). One year soon after the awards, I heard a children’s book specialist comment, “Another Newbery that will sit on a shelf and gather dust.” Happily, that won’t happen with this year’s winners. Beth Kromme and Susan Marie Swanson’s Caldecott, The House in the Night (Houghton Mifflin, $17.00 ages 2-5) and Neil Gaiman’s Newbery, The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins, $17.99, ages 9 and up) are books that children will choose.
Beth Krommes is the deserving illustrator of Susan Marie Swanson’s The House in the Night, a book that is a careful choreography of text and illustration. Swanson’s words have the classic feel of rhythmic lines that accumulate into story. On each of the first nine pages is a simple sentence that links to the page before and builds to the one coming next. These trace the path of the young heroine into a bright house where she finds “In that light rests a bed. On that bed waits a book. In that book flies a bird”. Every illustration, with its yellow highlights, entices us to follow. And then we are given a visual pause as a wordless page shows the small child reading the book in this cozy setting.
We have been soothed, but now the illustrations and text gracefully morph into a dream sequence where the child holds the soaring bird that “breathes a song…all about the starry dark.” This change lures young children to leap into a captivating flying fantasy where comfort never disappears for the aerial view of a small town has golden touches, reminding us that there are always reassuring lights below. Security established, the flying child soars into an orbit where she is welcomed by a friendly moon.
Then calm reasserts itself as child, bird, and story descend, the book ending with the kind of peaceful slowness that lulls babes to sleep. We see and read of the “sun in the moon, moon in the dark, dark in the song, song in the bird, bird in the book…”, until the child is snug in bed in “a home full of light”. The author and illustrator, together, create a child-friendly night with plenty of glow and excitement to scare away things that go bump and provide a path to guide sleep-weary children to pleasant dreams.
Neil Gaiman’s Newbery-winning The Graveyard Book has a more sophisticated version of scary-safe that will please children from 9 and up, as well as their parents. Gaiman’s start is startling and gripping. The black backgrounded first page reads, “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” And Dave McKean’s illustrations show a black-gloved hand holding a menacing gray blade. Children will be quickly swept into this illustrated start and Gaiman’s writing as they read of a shadowy man named Jack who steals into a home to murder its inhabitants, particularly a small infant. The infant, by virtue of his “wandering” nature has scaled his crib, bumped down the stairs and escaped through the open door into a graveyard. The violence is far less graphic than the picture of the strong-willed toddler and the tender, welcoming ghosts he meets in the graveyard that becomes his new home.
Gaiman has said that he sees this book as an “innoculation to make kids less scared of the world they’re in.” Gaiman’s graveyard is more homey than frightening. Its locked gates provide assurance and every ghost in the place is ready to entertain, educate, protect and befriend the boy they name Nobody (or Bod) Owens. Bod’s adoptive parents are the childless ghosts, Mr. and Mrs. Owens and his mysterious guardian is Silas, a being who is neither dead, nor alive, but always wise. The book settles quickly into a gentle rhythm, a series of adventures. Bod grows from toddler to 16 years-old, wandering among water stained graves through scraggly grasses with the care of everyone from 2000 year-old Casius Pompeius to the stern Miss Lupescu who teaches Bod about calls for help, ghouls and night-gaunts and feeds him disgusting beetroot-barley-stew-soup.
Whether dead, or alive, the entire cast of characters is fascinating. As Bod grows and changes, each chapter brings him a new challenge and many times a companion to help. When his first trip into the land of living finds him trapped, he’s rescued by Liza Hempstock, who was once “drownded and burneded and buried” as a witch. Liza became a witch as she rose “nine-parts dead and covered with duckweed and stinking pond-muck” and took to cursing easily. “Like dancing it was,” she tells Bod, “when your feet pick up the steps of a new measure your ears have never heard and your head don’t know, and they dance it until dawn.” It’s Liza that helps Bod master the Fading when he needs to escape danger. And as his reputation builds as “the live boy”, he learns other ghostly skills like “Dreamwalking”, a talent he uses to turn a bully’s dreams into nightmares. By 16, Bod is a hero who is able to take on the terrifying adversaries that threatened him in childhood.
Gaiman’s language is a rich as his plotting, making Graveyard a supreme read-aloud, a fact proved by Gaiman’s audio version (Harper Audio, $29.95, unabridged, 7 CDs). The book has all the magic and adventure of Harry Potter, but Gaiman’s masterful storytelling lifts it far above. There are phrases that shine with subtle humor and historical illusions, eloquently described settings, skillfully mixed moods, and an obvious passion for words.
Many bits will please adults as much as children, securing it as an ideal family read-aloud. Graveyard is a deserving Newbery with the perfect balance of literary merit and child-appeal.