The Graveyard Book 1600w

The Graveyard Book incorporates a number of the elements present in other coming-of-age novels indeed, Gaiman himself has admitted that the novel was greatly influenced by Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894), which may be considered one of the best-known of such novels (Horn, 2010). Gaiman described the idea as, ‘something a lot like ‘The Jungle Book’ and set it in a graveyard’ (Gaiman quoted in Rich, 2009). The similarities between the two books are clear; in the book titles, the protagonist, even in individual chapters, for example the comparisons between the third chapter in The Graveyard Book, ‘The Hounds of God’ and the second chapter in Book One of The Jungle Books, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’. Gaiman’s ability to take the premise of a popular book over a hundred years old and develop it into an enjoyable children’s book that is both modern and relevant, demonstrates how the traditions of children’s literature can be transformed to meet the demands of a new audience.

A further example of the on-going tradition of the coming-of-age novel is the Harry Potter series, specifically Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The protagonists in both the Harry Potter novels and The Graveyard Book are orphaned as babies when their parents/family are killed by a murderer who, after failing to kill them, continues to hunt them until the two meet in a final ‘show-down’. This premise features in numerous books for children throughout the history of children’s literature, from the already mentioned Jungle Books to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events