Johnny and the Dead

No one should need me to tell them that Terry Pratchett writes utterly enchanting young adult fiction. My first exposure was to The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell series is one of those wonderful YA titles that's similarly accessible to children of pretty much all ages, as well as adults cloyingly referred to as the “young at heart.” This particular novel is second in a loose trilogy that begins with Only You Can Save Mankind, but I haven't gotten ahold of it yet, and had no problem following on with this second entry. Johnny, a middle-school aged boy, begins to speak to the dead in his local cemetary, who protest the destruction of their “home”; naturally, his friends think he's gone a bit funny, and the inhabitants of the cemetary start coming up with their own solutions to the problem. Pratchett also manages to throw in a bit of national history and a comic commentary on the shift in social mores, resulting in a timeless sort of children's novel that reminds me greatly of the works of Madeline L'Engle.