Last week I reviewed a great adult summer mystery. This week is the kids' turn, but parents, don't feel left out. This book is a good read for the whole family. Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" sounds like it ought to be some coffee table pictorial full of photos of headstones. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Gaiman's wonderful tale took the top children's literary honor this past autumn, the John Newbery Medal. It is one of the most charming stories I have ever read. You won't be disappointed."The Graveyard Book" opens with a very scary scene: A hired assassin is in the process of wiping out an entire family. Okay, so maybe you shouldn't read this to your five year-old. Readers are kept in the dark as to why. It makes no sense; the family is so ordinary and unremarkable.

The killer doesn't bargain on the toddler escaping his grasp. Fortunately, the child is taken in by a very unusual community. The boy manages to squeeze through a fence into an old graveyard, where the "residents" walk at night. One of the ladies finds the little boy and begs to keep him and protect him. She and her husband adopt him and give him his own name. "He looks like nobody but himself," Mrs. Owens says. So Nobody Owens is his name, or Bod for short.

The residents don't mind caring for the child but there are practical matters to worry about: food, clothing, education. They enlist a guardian from the undead who, like Bod, has Freedom of the Graveyard: Silas. Silas collects food and clothing for Bod and teaches him to read, using the headstones for a primer. Later he brings in a special teacher, Miss Lupescu, to give him more practical lessons.

Bod's friendships with the various ghost children of the graveyard are charming, yet you wonder how a living child will make friends with the living. He eventually meets a little girl who is wandering the graveyard on a sunny day. Together they discover the oldest tomb in the graveyard, that of the Indigo Man, which also contains a fearful guardian spirit. Bod is not as frightened as his little friend, but keeps the secret to himself.

As Bod grows, he begins to outgrow some of the ghost children as friends and seeks out new ones. He meets a young witch, or so they called her when they drowned her and burnt her bones.

Eliza doesn't mind that so much, but she does mind that they buried her just outside the graveyard with no stone to mark her there. This leads to one of Bod's biggest adventures outside the graveyard, when he attempts to sell something to buy her a headstone.

Gaiman's graveyard is peopled with wonderfully rich characters and some truly macabre creatures of the undead. The relentless killer and his band are fascinatingly drawn and rich. The book reads easily as a single story, although each chapter could almost be a short story by itself. A great read for around the campfire, it is well worth your time and you will find yourself looking at headstones and graveyards with a greater appreciation of the community there.