Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Publication Date:  August 29, 2006
Publisher:  HarperCollins 
Pages:  162
Series:  Stand Alone
Genre:  Fantasy
Synopsis:  In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close. The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own.  Only it's different...  At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter around the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.  Other children are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits and all the tools she can find if she is to save the lost children, her ordinary life, and herself.

Review:  Coraline, not Caroline.  The name is as peculiar as the story itself.  That's what I have learned to expect from Neil Gaiman:  altogether peculiar and otherwise macabre.

Neil Gaiman captures childhood and horror into one twisted, gothic novel that plays on whims and fears.  It is, without a doubt, surreal and dreamlike, in which the dream turns out to be a nightmare.  

I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?

But, being a children's book, and a fantastic one at that, I did find it a bit stripped down to its bones, a bit hungry for detail and depth.  

The otherworld was created by the nefarious Other Mother and her cast of "others." She, and her world, are delightfully disturbing, fit with buttons for eyes and adventure games that end in death. There is a quote in the end from the author himself in which he mentions that to children, Coraline is viewed as a grand adventure, while to adults, it is a horror show. Being at the precarious in-between stage of that measure, I could see it as both.  To kids, it is Coraline fighting monsters, yet adults may see it as her despairing, in the negative ways adults tend to do.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

Coraline is clever, and bold, and bored (as children, stuck in the world of adults so often are).  She's quirky and tough, and has a curious mind.  It's true:  curiosity almost did kill the cat.  Speaking of, the cat was portrayed flawlessly.  If my cat began to speak and spy, I have no doubt he would sound exactly like the cat (for cats need no names).

The neighbors, as eclectic a bunch of characters I have come about, serve their purposes, well, purposefully.  There were no unnecessary people to muddle the plot, and they never intruded upon the main story-line, only furthered it.

The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.

I've been on a Neil Gaiman kick as of late, and I fear for what I will do when I get to the end of his works.  Is it possible to experience book withdrawal?  Let's hope he writes quickly.  If any of his upcoming novels are in any shape or form similar to Coraline, I have no doubt I will enjoy them.