- For a Newbery it isn't accessible to an elementary age audience as much as it could be and is borderline YA material because of its content. The book starts out with a man killing a toddler's parents and sibling while the boy escapes to a graveyard nearby where he is raised by ghosts.
- The book has some very clever language, story development, and twists and turns.
- Many of the minor characters didn't interest me. I just didn't see the point of some of them and they seemed to be random.
- The book is very episodic, which lends to a lack of time markers, especially when it concerns the main character, Bod (short for Nobody) Owens.
- Much of the world created by the author is not explained enough and the "rules" if you will of how the different creatures interact in the world are unclear. This is most obvious with different "categories," if you will, of the dead creatures and humans.
- The story comes full circle, which is great. However, the explanation for why Bod's family was murdered was too sudden considering a great action buildup in about the last 100 or so pages before the reason is revealed.
- Lastly, based off the content, seeming lack of explanation of some plot points, and the fact that this book is more accessible to a YA audience, I would not have awarded it the Newbery medal. This doesn't mean that I don't think it has some good points to it, because it does as I hope I have explained earlier in this post.
I also spent time in a group discussing the Caldecott winners (the winner and the honor books). My opinion is that while The House in the Night is a well-illustrated book I would have given the Caldecott to one of the honor books, A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams, for its very clever use of multiple mediums in the artwork.
