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bloodygranuaileIn a desperate bid to complete my Goodreads challenge this year (Why oh why did I extend it by 25 books?), I have been looking at the shortest, fastest-looking reads on my TBR shelf, and that means middle-grade. Luckily, because I have excellent taste in middle-grade fiction, this meant I finally got around to reading Niel Gaiman’s Coraline.
I’ve seen the movie, which was pretty awesome—directed by Henry Selick, who is the only stop-motion animation director worth having direct your stop-motion movie—so I mostly knew what the storyline would be, although it’s been a couple of years.
Since this is a Niel Gaiman book, and particularly one of his children’s books, it’s both cute and creepy. Coraline moves into a new flat with her parents, and is bored, feeling that her parents aren’t paying enough attention to her because they’re doing boring grown-up things, like working.
Coraline fancies herself an explorer, so she explores the flat and her upstairs neighbor and her downstairs neighbors and eventually explores her way through a door that opens into brick wall most of the time, and find herself, Alice-style, in a mirror version of her flat populated with alternate versions of her parents and neighbors. Her “other mother” seems quite nice at first, paying her lavish attention, but Coraline realizes something is up when she returns to her real flat and her parents are missing. Coraline and the other mother begin a terrifying game wherein Coraline has to get herself, her parents, and the ghosts of other trapped children out of the alternate universe and into the real world—or she’ll be stuck as the other mother’s pet forever, or at least until the other mother uses up her soul.
This story was simple, whimsical, and creepy all at the same time, with Coraline’s spare, childlike voice directing a close third person narrative that ends up feeling more than a little surrealist. It definitely makes me want to rewatch the movie, since there’s a lot of morbidly whimsical visuals in the book and I can’t remember how they were done. Overall it’s an excellent modern fairy tale, and I think I would have particularly loved it had it been around when I was eight or so.
I’ve seen the movie, which was pretty awesome—directed by Henry Selick, who is the only stop-motion animation director worth having direct your stop-motion movie—so I mostly knew what the storyline would be, although it’s been a couple of years.
Since this is a Niel Gaiman book, and particularly one of his children’s books, it’s both cute and creepy. Coraline moves into a new flat with her parents, and is bored, feeling that her parents aren’t paying enough attention to her because they’re doing boring grown-up things, like working.
Coraline fancies herself an explorer, so she explores the flat and her upstairs neighbor and her downstairs neighbors and eventually explores her way through a door that opens into brick wall most of the time, and find herself, Alice-style, in a mirror version of her flat populated with alternate versions of her parents and neighbors. Her “other mother” seems quite nice at first, paying her lavish attention, but Coraline realizes something is up when she returns to her real flat and her parents are missing. Coraline and the other mother begin a terrifying game wherein Coraline has to get herself, her parents, and the ghosts of other trapped children out of the alternate universe and into the real world—or she’ll be stuck as the other mother’s pet forever, or at least until the other mother uses up her soul.
This story was simple, whimsical, and creepy all at the same time, with Coraline’s spare, childlike voice directing a close third person narrative that ends up feeling more than a little surrealist. It definitely makes me want to rewatch the movie, since there’s a lot of morbidly whimsical visuals in the book and I can’t remember how they were done. Overall it’s an excellent modern fairy tale, and I think I would have particularly loved it had it been around when I was eight or so.