I note with pleasure that Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book has won the 2009 Newberry Medal. It is a delightful and fascinating story, and I recommend it for all children ten and up, including grown children like me.
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I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Since I haven't read "The Jungle Book," I didn't know until I read an interview with Gaiman that the outline was basically, "The Jungle Book" with animals replaced by the graveyard denizens. I'm curious whether Gaiman's book follows the structure of "The Jungle Book" closely, or was just used as a very basic template of "orphaned child raised by animals/ghosts."
The plot structure is very similar: the enemy who will some day return to kill the hero, the non-human protectors, the eventual defeat of the enemy and return to human society. But the incidents along the way are quite different, the characters very much different, and the tone of the writing completely different.
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