The Graveyard Book

I recently finished reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.  The book is a re-imagining of Kipling’s Jungle Book.  Instead of a toddler being raised by the animals in the jungle after his family has been attacked by a tiger, a toddler is raised by the spirits living (well, deading.  Wait, is that a word?  Probably not.  How about “dwelling.”  Let’s go with “dwelling.”) in a graveyard after his family is murdered. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve been exposed to any part of the Jungle Book, including Disney’s adaptation, so I don’t recall much in detail.  Many, if not all of the stories in the Graveyard Book, seemed similar to those of the Jungle Book.  The dangers, lessons, and outcomes were similar between the two tellings.

As a youth, the Jungle Book seemed like a collection of adventures of a young, innocent child in a fantasy land of anthropomorphized animals that regularly ended in a lesson learned.  With age, my perspective on the stories has changed. 

From an adult’s point of view, these are all tales of parenting.  Throughout the earlier stories the child needs lots of help and protection from the surrogate parents.  As the child gets older, he begins to be able to accomplish more on his own without needing to be saved.  Ultimately, when the boy returns to the world of people, it is representative of a child having grown up and striking out on his own.

So, I ask those of you with children, who may have read either book with your children relatively recently; did you experience these stories from a different perspective this time?  Did you enjoy those stories anew from a parent’s point of view?