If watching Bod grow from the toddler who wanders into the graveyard to the teen who outwits the Sleer, the ghouls past the ghoul-gate, and the man Jack tugged your heart, you'll love the unnamed boy in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Guided by the Hempstock women the way Bod leans on Silas and Miss Lupescu, he confronts the menacing Ursula Monkton and learns what courage and sacrifice look like when you're small and the world is very big. It's the same mix of wonder and danger, with that bittersweet understanding that growing up means letting go.

If the way Mr. and Mrs. Owens, Silas, and Miss Lupescu knit themselves around Bod—turning a graveyard into a sanctuary—made you melt, The House in the Cerulean Sea will hit the same note. Like Bod’s found family rallying during the Danse Macabre and against the Jacks, Linus Baker discovers a seaside orphanage where Arthur and a ragtag group of extraordinary children make a gentle, fiercely loyal home. You’ll get that same warmth of unlikely guardians and outcast kids learning they belong.

If you enjoyed how Silas’s quiet guidance shapes Bod—teaching him boundaries, concealment, and when not to use a gift—A Wizard of Earthsea delivers that dynamic with mythic clarity. Ged begins reckless, as Bod sometimes does when he slips beyond the graveyard walls, and Ogion mentors him toward patience and true names. Ged’s confrontation with the shadow he unleashed mirrors Bod facing the man Jack: a reckoning with one’s own fear and responsibility.

If the graveyard’s mysteries—the Sleer’s cryptic whispers, the Hounds of God, the hidden ways beyond the ghoul-gate—enchanted you precisely because they were never fully explained, The Night Gardener will satisfy. Two siblings enter a manor where a wishing tree and a shadowy figure grant desires at a terrible cost. Like Bod learning that some doors shouldn’t be opened and some names shouldn’t be spoken, the kids must navigate a magic that tempts, corrupts, and refuses to be neatly codified.

If what you loved was the close, hushed feel of Bod’s life—quiet lanes, the caretaker’s cottage, hidden crypts—and how entire worlds seemed to fit inside that small patch of ground, Skellig offers that same intimacy. Michael discovers a frail, possibly angelic being in his garage; with Mina’s help (a kindred spirit to Scarlett), he nurses it back to strength. The wonder is close to home, the miracles are soft-spoken, and the emotional lift is as gentle as Bod’s parting walk beyond the graveyard gates.