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This is a favourite so I knew I'd enjoy it again even though it was only around 2 years since my last visit; this is one of those books I could pick up at any time. (I must say that Kipling's The Jungle Book never quite held the same attraction for me; I admire it for its place in history/literature more than for the stories themselves.)
I think it takes a very special touch to be able to weave a tale like this, where grief, and loss, and violence and ugliness are so central to the story and yet the story avoids losing itself in any of these things. That, almost as much as anything else, is what makes this feel so much a fairytale; the prose remains mostly light and unaffected and yet the feelings are all there and none of the depth is lost.
I find Gaiman to be an adventure; when you pick up a new book of his you never know what what you will find. I like his voice, so I buy and read all his books, but they get quite a wide range of responses from me. My favourites of his include this, as well as Neverwhere (a novelisation of the TV series he wrote), and Stardust - another story that feels so much like a fairytale, though rather more traditional in its styling than this book.
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