Charlotte's Library

The Graveyard Book written by Neil Gaiman illustrated by Dave McKean I think I am one of the very few people who truly disliked this book. It has a slow start, keeps going slowly, coming to a very anticlimactic and predictable ending. Not only that, but it is extraordinarily difficult to understand with the vocabulary used. The target audience is 6th-8th graders. They are not going to understand what is going on. I'm sure it's Newbery material because of this fact, because the award committees want the best written book, but I can't see kids actually picking this up and reading it and liking it. It's not written for kids, in a kid friendly way. If I was a kid, the language in this book would drive me up the wall in confusion, rendering me incapable of focusing on the plot at all. I really feel like this was written for an awards committee rather than the readers themselves. It's a very chaotically unclear and unnecessarily wordy book. The premise is fas...

currently reading: Liar (!!!) The Sandman: Endless Nights written by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by various Some of the writing was overly flowery, some of the chapters were utterly incomprehensible...and yet, there's just something there that draws the reader in. I found it irritating that the art was different for each chapter, and would have really liked to have seen unity both in illustration and plot. I still don't know what the overarching storyline of this was supposed to be because there simply wasn't one. Particularly disappointing was the 2nd chapter, falling into the graphic novel trap of excessive nudity with absolutely no purpose. I didn't need to see that, it served no purpose. I really did want to learn more about the Endless, though, and I found some of the dropped plot threads to be really intriguing, and I just want to know more. I hope some of the issues are cleared up in the next few volumes, because I feel like there's a really good story som...