Anne Hutchinson's Way by Jeannine Atkins and Michael Dooling

The book Anne Hutchinson's Way, written by Jeannine Atkins and beautifully illustrated by Michael Dooling tells the story of Anne Hutchinson, a puritan who was sent to the American colonies with her family in 1634. This book focuses on her life in the Massachusetts's Bay Colony, and ends with her and her family being exiled from the colony due to her outspoken disagreements with the local minister. Though this is a bleak story, it is one that I imagine young readers will enjoy. Atkins' simple descriptive sentences and Dooling's gorgeously detailed painted illustrations bring the minutiae of colonial life into sharp focus, helping transport readers to an America that may seem very foreign to them.

Subject-wise, I feel that this is a story that will remain with young readers long after they read it. At it's core, this is a story about following your conscience even in the face of threats of violence or punishment. The ending serves as a reminder that, in real life, not all conflicts have fairy tale endings (though I will admit that this final exile is not presented in such an oppressively bleak fashion as to throw the readers into early fits of nihilism; Anne still has her family and still has a home). I feel that this book works well as both a character study and a window into a specific era of American history.

Additonal Resource: Great Americans- Anne Hutchinson by Kiely Miller

This early childhood nonfiction resource from Weekly Reader Publishing is an excellent supplement to the story told by Atkins and Dooling. Great Americans: Anne Hutchinson is a textbook designed to be read by early elementary readers and provides them with more detailed information about Anne Hutchinson and the world she lived in. The book is filled with image of historical paintings and maps of relevant locations. In addition to educating young readers about colonial America, this book would make an excellent introduction to the research skills that students will need later in life such as navigating a table of context or glossary, comparing text information to relevant images, using a map to contextualize historical information. I would highly recommend this text to young readers.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman with illustrations by Dave McKean

As you might (or more likely, might not) be able to guess from it's title, Neil Gaiman's young adult novel The Graveyard Book is a kind of reimagining of the basic premise of Rudyard Kipling's two volume novel The Jungle Book. For those not familiar with the story, Kipling's book tells the story of Mowgli, a human child who is left alone in a jungle after his family is killed and has a series of adventures as he is raised and educated by the various animals of the jungle that become his adopted family. Gaiman's book tells a similar story about a toddler whose family is murdered and who then stumbles into a sprawling historical graveyard in London where he is protected and raised by the various ghosts of the men, women, and children who are buried there.

As you can probably already tell, this is an extremely dark book, insofar as it deals with the concept of death in almost every paragraph (in fact, death itself appears as a character a handful of times throughout the book). That being said, you would be wrong to assume that this is a horror book. While it does have the occasional monster and moments of peril (particularly frightening is Jack, the shadowy figure who murders the family at the beginning, and stalks the protagonist through the third act), the book has plenty of humor and a solid emotional core. The ghosts of the graveyard are not presented as mournful or tortured. They seem rather like retirees, who are content to wander the community of their graveyard, relaxed and unburdened by the stresses of living.

Structurally, the book is episodic in that each chapter is a complete adventure in the life of the main character, named Nobody Owens by his adopted parents (Bod for short). Each chapter takes place about two years after the previous chapter, so that over the course of the book, we see Bod grow from a toddler to a young man of about 15 years. 

The book begins with the brutal of Bod's family by a character referred to as "the man Jack". Bod, barely old enough to walk, escapes the carnage by chance, happening to stumble out of his open front door into the night pursued by the murderer. The boy ends up in a graveyard, where he is spotted by several ghosts. A man called Silas, who, it is heavily implied but never outright stated, is actually a vampire, uses supernatural powers of persuasion to convince the man Jack that he did not see the toddler enter the graveyard and to continue his pursuit of the child elsewhere. Meanwhile the ghosts of the graveyard argue about what to do with the child, with some saying they owe it to him to protect him, and others wanting to eject him. Eventually, the angel of death (here referred to as "the Lady In Grey") makes a rare appearance to tell the ghosts to take the child in. The Owens', an elderly couple who died some 250 years ago, takes him in.

The book then follows Bod's life in the graveyard, and the various supernatural adventures he has there. In one chapter, Bod discovers an ancient druid burial ground in a cavern beneath the graveyard, filled with ancient artifacts and protected by a phantom called the Sleer. In another chapter, Bod discovers that every graveyard on earth contains a ghoul gate, a portal to an ancient realm populated by mischievous, corpse-eating ghouls. In another chapter, Bod makes friends with a ghost of a teenage girl who has been shunned by the rest of the graveyard because she was executed for being a witch (which, it turns out, she actually was) While these various adventures are occurring, Bod's educator and guardian Silas, the only inhabitant of the graveyard who is able to leave its walls and enter the real world is conducted research to discover why Bod's family was murdered, and why the man Jack is still out there searching for Bod.

Eventually, Bod becomes old enough to star attending school. He has learned tricks from the ghosts he lives with about how to go unnoticed by most people and so is able to enter class without questions being raised about who he is or who his parents are; teachers tend to forget he exists as soon as they take their eyes off of him. Before long, Bod gets in trouble after using some of his other supernatural skills to exact revenge on a couple of bullies and he is forced to leave the school and return to the graveyard.

At the end of the book the man Jack finally tracks Bod back to the graveyard. It is revealed that he is a member of an organization called the Jacks of All Trades, mystical assassins and thieves, who murdered Bod's family because it was prophesied that someone from that line would be a being who walked in the land of both the living and the dead who would destroy the organization. The man Jack, and a few other Jack's (the last of their organization) attack the graveyard and Bod uses lessons and tricks learned from his previous adventures (the ghoul gate and the Sleer, for example) to defeat them. The book ends with Bod turning fifteen and slowly losing his ghostly abilities (as well as his abilities to see the ghosts at all). With money and a passport provided by Silas, Bod leaves to explore the world knowing that, after he has lived a full life, his spirit will return to the graveyard to be with his adopted family. 

This is a book full of fascinating ideas. In some ways, it feels like a story about time travel as the ghosts that help raise Bod all come from different points in history and still think and talk and act like people of their time. Gaiman uses these ghosts to talk about the history of London in a way that feels very natural and will appeal to young readers. There is also an extended mythology to the world that Gaiman presents here that, like Rowling's Harry Potter seems like it could fill thousands of pages of adventures. I would love to see this possibly turn into a series, though it works perfectly fine as the standalone story it was intended to be.

The character of Bod is very likely to connect with young readers who are transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Throughout the story, Bod finds himself torn between two worlds, unable to face the dangers and responsibilities of the world of the living, but never fully at home among the dead (one problem he faces, for example, is that he keeps outgrowing the ghost friends he makes, as ghost children don't age like he does). As befits a book about a graveyard, I would describe this novel as being a book about dealing with loss and transition. Death is discussed very frankly in this story and Bod often struggles to deal with changes in his life. I would highly recommend this book to anyone young, old, or recently deceased to help them learn about how to more gracefully accept that changes and losses with which life presents them.