Summary: The Graveyard Book

thegraveyardbook_hardcover

These book summaries are designed as captures for what I’ve read, and aren’t necessarily great standalone resources for those who have not read the book. Their purpose is to ensure that I capture what I learn from any given text, so as to avoid realizing years later that I have no idea what it was about or how I benefited from it.

Lessons

  • Things are not necessarily what they seem. The extremely kind and protective guardian is a Vampire. The other guardian is a werewolf.

  • The witch is a mostly nice girl

  • The super nice guy towards the end is the worst killer of all

  • The whole book is about a graveyard, but it’s a place that becomes increasingly less scary as you learn more about it

  • The people there are just as quirky and strange, and NORMAL as anywhere else. This is a life lesson about things that are different from us. Or situations. Or places.

  • Silas is part of the honor guard now, but he used to be worse than the Jacks. He was the worst kind of vampire anyone could imagine. But he grew out of it. Maybe everyone would grow out of evil given enough time?

  • What’s interesting to me about Silas is the question of how to judge him? Is he good, is he evil? Is he evil because he did evil in the past? How long does it take to rejuvenate one’s alignment?

  • As he said, people can change. That’s another core lesson.

  • But perhaps the most important lesson of all is that the living should live their lives. Embrace them. Rejoice in them. Don’t act like one of the dead people in the graveyard when you have the gift of still being alive.

  • That was definitely the parting message.

  • I still prefer the more subtle ones, though.

  • Just a spectacular book.

Find my other book summaries here.

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