By Neil Gaiman
A toddler whose family is killed in the night wanders up the hill to an old graveyard, where the ghosts take him in and raise him as their own.
One night a man named Jack comes to a house with a knife and kills a family, mother, father, and older sister, but the baby climbs out of his crib, toddles out the open door, and makes his way up the hill to an old graveyard. The ghosts who live there decide to keep him safe. They name him Nobody Owens, Bod for short, give him the freedom of the graveyard, and set a mysterious guardian named Silas, who is neither living nor dead, to bring him food and watch over him. Bod grows up among the dead, learning to fade and to walk in dreams, making friends with a witch's ghost and a living girl, and getting into the kind of trouble a boy raised by ghosts gets into. But the man Jack never stopped hunting him, and one day Bod will have to face the men who killed his family.
This is the top of the trail: the scariest, the saddest, and the most beautiful, a book that opens on a murder and then becomes a tender, funny story about a boy growing up. A reader who's climbed the earlier rungs is ready for a scare that carries real weight, and Gaiman rewards them with a Newbery-winning book that treats death and danger seriously without ever being grim. It asks the most of any book here, in reading level and in feeling, which is exactly why it comes last.