Just as each day I wake my dreams remain shrouded by night, so each day I live my childhood becomes more dreamlike and drifts a little bit further beyond my grasp. The results of that childhood are evident every day, the loves and insecurities produced in the factory of my childhood course through my veins with every beat but the factory itself is dark, empty and abandoned. THE GRAVEYARD BOOK captures this feeling for me. From the beginning it has the quality and language of dreams in its description of the murders that set the story in motion. As the child grows, the ghosts who raise him, echoes of the people they were at the moment they died, are dreams that walk and talk. It is a joy of the book that the real world remains a threat to this dream childhood the way ghosts are usually considered a threat to the living. As the child grows, some of his ghost friends fall away, reject him, as he continues to grow up (and grow more real) while they remain still. Others remain by his side, watching over him and teaching him what they learned up to the point they stopped living. As a child I would have absolutely adored this book. As an adult there are modest flaws that bothered me. The author admits to having written the book in chunks over time and this lends to a certain disjointed quality in the narrative, some abrupt stops and simplified solutions. I also never bought the conspiracy revealed at the end to be responsible for the murders that start the book. Beyond all that I loved the book's presentation of childhood being a land of ghosts. The magic used to navigate those lands left behind as we grow. The whole world before us as we walk out the gates that once protected but also contained us.