The Graveyard Book My First Glog

Book Title:  The Graveyard Book
Book Author:  Neil Gaiman
Written in 2010

Summary:

The story begins with a bad man named Jack murdering an entire family. That is everyone except for a baby boy that is upstairs asleep in his crib. The baby awakes and crawls out of his bed. He crawls out of the house and up the hill to a graveyard. This is where he is found by a family of ghosts who decide that they want to keep him and raise him as their own. They are the Owens family and they decide that they want to name him Nobody Owens. They call him Bod for short. The boy has the entire graveyard as his playground. He is told that he will always be safe as long as he remains inside the gates of the graveyard. The entire graveyard full of ghosts become his caretakers and watch over him to keep him safe. They teach him all kinds of tricks and things that only dead people know. One ghost named Silas takes on a special responsibilty of teaching him how to fade in and out and special supernatural powers that will help him stay safe when humans come into the graveyard.

Bod grows up going on all kinds of adventures in the graveyard and is quite happy staying in the graveyard until he one day meets a real human little girl named Scarlett. They become really good friends and start hanging out everyday. They start going on adventures together both insida and outside of the graveyard. She convinces Bod that it is safe outside of the graveyard too. Scarlett's tells her mother about Bod, but her mother thinks he is Scarlett's imaginary friend. During one of Scarlett and Bod's adventures together, Scarlett's mother thinks that she is missing and becomes very upset. When Scarlett eventually returns, her mother thinks it is best to move away.  Bod is very upset that she is gone and he misses her terribly.

Bod goes back to his old routine of being alone with all the ghosts again everyday in the graveyard, although sometimes he does go out on adventures by himself outside of the graveyard, even though the ghost family tells him how dangerous it is outside the graveyard, especially for him. He eventually finds out that the reason they don't want him to go outside the graveyard is because, Jack is still out there looking for him. He found out that the boy was there that night and survived by crawling away. He wants to kill him. It is because he killed the family that night to become a part of a secret society and the secret society will be destroyed if Bod is not killed too. Bod is now afraid for the first time in his life. He now is afraid to leave the graveyard again.

After several years, Scarlett and her mother move back to town. Scarlett immediately goes back down to the graveyard to see if Bod is still there. Bod is very happy to see her and very happy that she is back. They become fast friends again just like before, only this time, they are older and they eventually fall in love.

Scarlett meets the man that now lives in the house that Bod once lived as a child and she becomes friends with this man. She has no idea that he is Jack, the murderer. He tricks her into bringing Bod to meet him outside the graveyard and when Bod meets him, Jack attacks Bod. Bod gets away and runs back to the safety of the graveyard. Jack takes Scarlett because he knows Bod will come looking for her.  Bod finds out that Jack has Scarlett and tells Jack to meet him. He has Jack meet him in a secret chamber. Jack thinks he will go there to meet Bod and kill him, but Bod knows that there is a very old monster in that chamber called the Sleer. The ghosts have told Bod all about the sleer and Bod has met the sleer before, once with Scarlett on one of their adventures outside the graveyard. The sleer has lived in this chamber for thousands of years waiting for his master to come back after him. When Jack meets up with Bod, the sleer is there too, Bod tricks Jack into telling the sleer that he is his master. When Jack tells him this, the sleer grabs Jack and immediately disappears into a wall.  They are never seen or heard from again.

Later Bod grows up into a man and decides it is finally time to leave the graveyard. He will miss his ghost family and friends, but he knows it is time for him to finally move on. He says goodbye and leaves to start his own real life adventure in the real world.

The End