The Graveyard Book

Eyes grey, hair “mouse-colored,” the main protagonist, little Nobody Owens—so named by his adoptive mother, the ghost Betsy Owens—as a toddler is rescued from his family’s killer by the graveyard’s ghosts, who raise him in their cemetery. “Bod” Owens wanders the graveyard wearing a gray sheet in a nod to the classic ghost image seen in popular culture and is schooled by the ghosts and from books brought to him by Silas. He learns well, grows up healthy and strong, and begins to interact with people out beyond the graveyard.

He’s hunted, though, by the Jacks of All Trades because he is prophesied as one “who would walk the borderland between the living and the dead. That if this child grew to adulthood it would mean the end of our order and all we stand for” (271). Indeed, to save himself and Scarlett, Bod disposes of all five of the last remaining Jacks.

The name of Bod’s biological family, Dorian, isn’t revealed until Scarlett researches their murder. Dorian is an ancient Greek name derived from Dorus, son of Helen of Troy and a hero with gods in his ancestry. Dorian derives from a word for “gift” and/or from “child of the sea.