The Boy in the Cemetery by Sebastian Gregory

The Boy in the Cemetery by Sebastian Gregory
Release Date: 29th October 2014
Publisher: Carina
Source: Publisher
Add it: Goodreads
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This is the story of a girl who didn’t want to live...

Carrie Anne is desperately unhappy. Tangled in a web of abuse, she seeks solace in the cemetery that backs onto her garden. But something creeps between the gravestones. Carrie Anne is not alone

...and a boy who cannot die.

The cemetery is home to a boy. He has guarded these forgotten bones since meeting a gruesome end two hundred years ago. Neither dead nor alive, he has been watching for a long time. And now, he finally has the visitor he’s been waiting for...

If ever there was a book that should really have come with some kind of trigger warning, it should have been this one. I will read anything but I have to tell you that probably my least favourite thing to read about is graphic child abuse which unfortunately is the backstory for one of the two main characters in The Boy in the Cemetery.

So I was kind of assuming this would be a book similar to The Nightmare before Christmas – you know, a little quirky, kind of weird and out there but ultimately enjoyable. It was not any of these things. The Boy in the Cemetery is a relentlessly grim story about an orphan who becomes a more or less undead guardian of the dead in an abandoned cemetery; our other main character is a young girl who is the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her father and wilful neglect and ignorance from her mother. Honestly, it was awful.

I don’t know what this story was aiming to achieve but in any case it doesn’t really go anywhere. The plot doesn’t move forward much at all and the characters don’t develop. It almost reads like a grim fairytale, but I don’t know, I just didn’t enjoy it at all. A lot of the story, especially the abuse, felt as though it was just included to make the story darker as opposed to serving an actual purpose for the character or the plot and it made me very uncomfortable.

I just can’t get on board with a story that so blatantly feels like it’s hurting a female character for no reason other than plot progression. It happens too often in fiction and it needs to stop.