“The Graveyard Book” was considered to be the most important contribution brought to the children literature. Neil Gaiman’s novel was awarded with the John Newbery Medal on Monday after he had won his fame in literature through his science fiction and fantasy writings.
The novel tells the story of a boy who gets grown-up by ghosts in a cemetery due to his parents’ death, announced only in a few pages at the beginning of the book. The Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, said that Gaiman’s work was the most beautiful for its “delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing,” thus it had to be provided with such an award.
The discussions about the winner of the medal began back in December last year and the association also gave Beth Krommes the Randolph Caledoctt Medal for the illustration of “The House in the Night,” written by Susan Marie Swanson.
When reached to discuss the award, Gaiman, 48, was in Los Angeles doing press interviews for the film adaptation of his first children’s novel, “Coraline.” The writer said that he was amazed of receiving such a medal for a book which had already found the popular audience.
“The Graveyard Book” was published by HarperCollins Children’s Books and it has been on top of the New York Times best-seller list for children for 15 weeks. According to Gaiman’s opinion, there can’t be books which can be both best-sellers and winners. The book got sold in more than 71,000 copies, as the Nielsen Book Scan announced.
This award represented some kind of reverse for the many critics of the Newbery, who thought that the association used to select only the books that don’t find such a big audience among children. For example, Anita Silvey, the author of “100 Best Books for Children,” said last year that the Newberry selections were too difficult to be understood by many children.
The 2008 winner of the Newbery medal was “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village” by Laura Amy Schlitz. Yet, the book was considered to be too sophisticated for most children and it only sold 31,000 copies. But the chairwoman of the Newbery committee, Rose V. Trevino, stated that their choice had nothing to do with the popularity of the book but with its importance toward the children literature.
The British writer Gaiman stated that “The Graveyard Book” had to wait for two decades to be finished. The inspiration for the novel came from a real fact though. When Gaiman’s son, Michael, was a little boy and the family was living in a home without a yard, Gaiman had to take Michael to a graveyard across the street so the boy could ride his bicycle.
Due to Michael’s supposed intimacy with the graveyard, Gaiman thought that he could write something like a second “Jungle Book.”Yet, after he had written a few pages he decided to wait for a few more years considering that he hadn’t been good as a writer at that time.
