It starts off with a baby boy escaping the assassins who kill his family. Sound like an award-winning children's book to you? If it does, you're not alone. The American Library Association has presented Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book with The John Newbery Medal, the top prize in children's fiction.
Gaiman, author of the Sandman graphic novel series,was "wonderfully befuddled" by the award. Though he doesn't consider Graveyard to be a book only for children, he admits, " I think I would have loved it when I was eight, but I don’t think that all eight-year-olds were like me."
Now a father of three, Gaiman says of the book, "I've written my share of disturbing stuff, but this book is really a
way of trying to think about the process of growing up, and, of course,
the fundamentally joyous tragedy of being a parent, that if you do your
job properly, your kids will grow up and leave you."