The Jungle Book
Sometimes I think Neil Gaiman is a bit too clever for his own good. Having read Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book , Gaiman's Graveyard Book makes a lot more sense. And with The Jungle Book to compare to, I find that I'm liking The Graveyard Book a lot more. Both stories follow a young boy being brought up in extraordinary circumstances. Mowgli is raised by wolves, with a panther and a bear to teach him. Bod is raised by ghosts and receives similar tutelage from a vampire and a werewolf. Mowgli is plagued by the tiger, Shere Khan, who has been trying to kill him since he was a baby; Bod has a similar relationship with the man Jack. The Graveyard Book is more linear than The Jungle Book . It also sticks with (what I assumed to be) the main character for longer. The entirety of The Graveyard Boo k is about Bod, but Mowgli is only featured in the first three of The Jungle Book's seven chapters. That actually confused me a great deal, and I spent most of the ...