Josh

If you aren't looking for a book that requires a great amount of thinking or any background knowledge in the genre of fantasy, this is a good book to get. It's nice an long, if that's what you're looking for and all unknown information is spoon-fed to you all the way through the book. It's got your typical Romeo and Juliet-esque love story, and you can't help but root for them. There is not a lot of ambiguity is characters' good/evil alignments, except for a couple of characters, because that's really the basis of the plot.

All in all, I eat up this type of story, but that doesn't keep me from getting frustrated. I thought the voice acting was great. The southern accent annoyed me, but that has more to do with the book's setting. The plot is great. It's a new spin on something a little overdone. But I did get frustrated with the two main characters, because at times they seemed so thick-headed. I would have something figured out long before either of them did, and I wanted to yell at them for being dense. I didn't feel like the male protagonist was *totally* realistic. As I was Ethan's age about 8 years ago, I don't recall being that emotionally intelligent as a 16-year-old, so that is was stood out to me the most, as far as flaws go. Like I said, overall I liked the book. The characters weren't under or overdeveloped for the span of time it took to listen to the book. But I felt like the end was a big middle finger, and a ploy to make me buy the next book (which I did).

The song 16 Moons throughout the book is what really made the audiobook for me. It was a great touch, and it made my hair stand on end.

I had to read this for an Adolescent Literature class, and I fell in love with the book. The audiobook is even better than reading the book. The book has elements that could appeal to both the young and old. I would say a kid should be able to read it at about age nine or ten, sheerly because there are about three instances that may be just a little bit too creepy for a little kid. All of Gaiman's books are distinctly different. If you read and did not like Stardust, that does not mean you will dislike this book, but it does not mean that liking Stardust will make you dislike this one. They are just totally different and written in completely different styles. The Graveyard Book is much less dense than Stardust, but it has so much more to say. Gaiman's performance was superb, which is exactly what I expected.

I would not recommend this book to anyone who has trouble dealing with death or the concept of suicide. That being said, I think it is important that people read/listen to a book of this sort, just to reemphasize that everyone has their own story, and something you may think is trivial could just be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I thought the narration was excellently done. I'm glad there were two narrators, because that gave it the ability to sound more like a dialogue than someone just reading pages from a book.

I really enjoyed the book in both audio format and book form. I'm not sure which way I preferred, but I liked the audiobook well enough. The narrator sounded a little younger than I would have anticipated, so it was a little weird when very adult topics were covered, but that's really not enough to give it anything less than four stars. It was a quality audiobook that I would recommend to anyone that grew up in middle class suburbia.