The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

As with all my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman is one I ration out for fear of finishing all he has to offer. It is lamentable that The Graveyard Book sat on my TBR pile for so long, but since I've started with Neil's master class, it's part of the set reading, so I've dusted it off and finished it. Now, to backtrack somewhat, I have read Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book – the novel that Neil tips his hat to in The Graveyard Book. Instead of wild animals, a boy child named Nobody Owens – Bod for short – is raised by the dead. In a graveyard. And his guardian is a vampire named Silas. While a man named Jack aims to finish what he started the night he murdered Bod's family. What's not to love?

I'm not going to go into great depth in terms of the plot, except to say that this is a coming-of-age novel but it also touches on more existential subjects. It's not so much a book about the dead and their regrets, but rather a story that reminds us about what makes living important. And not just living, but exploring. And being prepared to make mistakes.

The Graveyard Book oozes a gothic atmosphere, and as always Neil's characters seem like real people you might've met already. I also find myself with a yen to explore old cemeteries soon. Make of that what you will. What Neil Gaiman does, with the same ease with which we breathe and our hearts beat, is to tell a story – one that satisfies yet tantalises with mysteries. If you, like me, are a fan of Neil's The Sandman comics, you'll be right at home with The Graveyard Book, which carries similar weight and resonance.

The Dreamer's Tears by Cristy Zinn

My only complaint with The Dreamer’s Tears by Cristy Zinn is that it’s clearly a book one in a series that still needs to be written, and I immediately needed to know more once I’d reached the end.

In this story, we meet Ivy Bauble, who lives in the little village of Newton. She’s accident prone and incurably curious. The last thing she expects is that she will become apprenticed to the Master Borinvere, who maintains the magical tower that protects the village from marauding Knightmares.

Zinn’s writing is highly imaginative, heartfelt and whimsical, and this is the kind of story I could well imagine a parent reading to a child for bedtime … or perhaps just enjoying for themselves. Zinn’s language flows musically, and would be a delight on the ears.

She has created a tactile, believable world filled with fascinating characters and a history, that feels as if it has a mythic resonance. I’d have loved for book one to go on a bit longer, to offer a little more resolution, as the ending rushed up quite abruptly, but there’s enough here to have me hooked and wanting more.

Beastkeeper by Cat Hellisen #review

Title: Beastkeeper
Author: Cat Hellisen
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co, 2015

One thing that Cat Hellisen does in her stories is immediately sweep readers away into her worlds that feel so tangible they might just exist on the very edge of our own, and this is the case with Beastkeeper. Though the story is aimed at children, and at a glance it’s a re-envisioning of "Beauty and the Beast", it’s very much appropriate for those of us who’re young of heart, and there was much here that spoke to me as an adult.

Sarah’s parents have never set down roots, and she’s spent all the years of her short life constantly moving to new towns and new schools. Consequently, she’s a lonely child and doesn’t have any friends. Her parents are everything to her, so when her mother leaves the family one night, she is devastated. To add to her burden, her father falls apart at the seams too, and it’s up to Sarah to keep things together – going to school and ensuring that the household limps along.

She finds refuge in her “Not-a-Forest”, a small vacant lot where she meets a strange boy, who may or may not become a friend – only he knows more than he’s letting on. She doesn’t have time to find out, however, as her father packs their life up and takes Sarah to go stay with her grandparents, who live in a run-down castle in the middle of a menacing forest. Here she discovers how her family has existed under a curse for years, and that she and her father are also trapped within the cycle of maleficent magic.

We follow Sarah as she tries to unravel the knots of hatred and obsession that have poisoned her grandparents and destroyed the lives of her parents, but in order to do so, she needs to be brave and travel through some truly dark places.

As always, Hellisen seems to effortlessly touch on the universality of fairy tales to delve even deeper and bring up underlying themes. One one level, this is a children’s quest to break a curse. On another, it’s a parable of how twisted love has soured to hate and indifference, and how one young person can find it in herself to step outside the trap of a destructive cycle. This is a dark, painful and elegant tale, made all the more beautiful, because Hellisen weaves with mystery and doesn’t hand over all the answers on a plate.

The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens #review

Title: The Emerald Atlas (The Books of Beginning #1)
Author: John Stephens
Publisher: Doubleday
Link 

Take everything that you loved about Harry Potter, Narnia and Middle Earth, mix it all together, and The Emerald Atlas will satisfy the dreams of your inner wide-eyed 10-year-old. A wise wizard? Yes. (Okay he does come across a little bumbling at times, and wears tweed, but he’s a wizard nonetheless.) An evil countess who’s really a witch? Yes. Dwarves? Lots of ’em, and all sporting the prerequisite beards and Scottish accents. Oh, don’t forget the hero. And a monster.

Then add a magic book, enough time-travelling to make your head spin, and three orphans who are trying to free a village while keeping a priceless artefact out of the clutches of evil, and you’ve got quite the epic fantasy.

Though it’s been a while since I’ve read children’s fiction, I very soon locked my inner adult in a cupboard and delved into The Emerald Atlas, book one of The Books of Beginning trilogy.

As far as storytelling goes, this is a fairly standard elaboration on the “chosen one” trope, but John Stephens handles it in such a way that it didn’t result in any eye-rolling. Granted, the novel gets off to a bit of a slow start, but what sold it to me was the large cast of support characters.

I’d have liked to have seen some of these get more prominence (or get their story arcs tied up neatly), as with Dena or Granny Peet; the former, unless she gets a reprise, didn’t serve that much purpose.

The setting is difficult to place. At first I thought the novel takes place in Victorian or Edwardian times, but the appearance of a Polaroid camera quickly nixed that idea. For some this might be an issue, but I chose to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the story for what it is: three children out to save the world from a powerful megalomaniac and her creepy minions (and the Secretary is horrible). What I appreciated is that Katherine, Emma and Michael aren’t sugary little kids. They bicker among each other and make mistakes. Yet somehow they make things work, and they have the adventure of a lifetime. Even better, it’s not done yet.

This review appeared in the Pretoria News on Monday, February 4, 2013