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This is a very charming, entertaining well-written little book that I greatly enjoyed reading, and I can see why everyone's raving about it (and why it's winning every YA award out there), but I was left with some niggling naggling feelings after finishing it. Some of those feeling started to crop up while I was reading it, which sort of spoilt my enjoyment, but I guess that's nobody's fault but my own.

One of the problems I had with the book was that I felt it got off to an exceptionally slow start. If I'd picked it up in a store without knowing Gaiman had written it and decided whether to buy it or not based on the first 10-20 pages alone, I probably wouldn't have. The book really doesn't pick up until the introduction of Miss Lupescu (whom I loved) and the ghouls (whom I loved in a different way -- some of the best wit in the book is Gaiman's dry descriptions of how disgusting they are) and doesn't start to sing until the chapter devoted to the witch, Liza, who lights up every page she's on (apparently Gaiman wrote that part of the book first, and it shows -- it's far more engaging and vivid than the first couple of chapters). As usual with Gaiman's novels, the action consists more of fantastic set pieces than connected and building sequences, although he does rather neatly go back and use apparently one-off events in tying up plot ends near the very end of the novel in a way which reminded me of J.K. Rowling (who didn't invent that technique, even if everyone screams about it as if she did).

I remain pretty amazed none of the reviews (that I've seen, anyway) draw attention to the very strong parallels between this and Peter S. Beagle's neglected classic, A Fine and Private Place (and one of my favourite books since I read it when I was about thirteen -- Beagle is a bit more well-known now than he was then, but he's still a terribly neglected author). Nob is kind of a combination of Beagle's two heroes in that book, Michael and Rebeck, and the twin themes of love blossoming in a place of death and the living hero's need to (eventually) leave his cemetery refuge drive both books.

As always, I found the minor characters far more well-drawn and interesting than the hero, who, like Richard in Neverwhere and Shadow in American Gods, struck me as rather a lump. What did Mr and Mrs Owens think of raising a living boy? What did Liza do when she wasn't talking to Nob? And Silas! There could have been a whole other book -- a thick one -- written about Silas, which was just how I felt about the Marquis in Neverwhere. It is not a good thing when your supposedly secondary characters keep being far more magnetic than your heroes.

And 'heroes' is the right word -- the focus is all on Nob, and even the vibrant Liza and the majestic Miss Lupescu serve mainly as means to his end of revenge. Beagle's book doesn't just focus on Rebeck and Michael, but on Mrs Klapper and Laura, who are more than their counterparts; we see them when Rebeck and Michael aren't around, and they do and feel things which aren't just caused by the men in their lives. I was unhappy at what happened to Miss Lupescu (and it's not even shown to the reader), but my annoyance at the way Gaiman treats his female characters came to a boil over Scarlett, Nob's childhood friend. It's not just that she's unthinking and gullible -- she is, after all, a child -- but she's just used, first by Jack, then by Nob, and finally by her male author, as nothing more than a Symbol of the real world Nob is, after all, still a part of. She never comes to life on her own. Likewise, when Nob isn't interested in Liza for a while, she simply disappears from the book (literally). We don't know much more about Mrs Owens than that she's Nob's mother. Scarlett's mother is the same. And so on. (I couldn't help wondering what kind of book it might have been if Jack or Nob -- or both! -- had been female.)

But for all that, the book is genuinely entertaining and deeply moving. The plot is very satisfyingly resolved (although for a while I couldn't decide whether Gaiman had been tripped up by the self-fulfilling prophecy trick, old as Oedipus, or slyly made fun of it while he was making use of it at the same time -- I decided on the latter). I'm not as big a fan of his sentence-level writing as everyone else seems to be -- I find it slightly overdone -- but his descriptions are, as ever, very evocative while sketched out in very few words (something chatterboxes like me can only envy), and the citizens of the cemetery leap off the page whenever we meet one, even if it's only for a few paragraphs.

Truly the biggest criticism I had is that the book felt far too short -- and that I longed for a sequel -- and when I came to the end I wanted to immediately start reading it all over again.


Addendum And may I just say, I had that Dorothy-wants-to-go-back-to-Kansas-WTF moment when Nob declared to learn about people he wants to leave his enchanted graveyard and go....TO SCHOOL. Gaiman must have had a very different experience of school than I did (I'm a dropout and autodidact). A US public school is the last place you would learn any fucking thing, except maybe the depths of human nature (although Nob winds up learning about that too). And we never do see Nob in a library. Libraries are the places to go if you want to simultaneously learn and blend in!