Coraline by Neil Gaiman Review (4 Stars)

Coraline's often wondered what's behind the locked door in the drawing room. It reveals only a brick wall when she finally opens it, but when she tries again later, a passageway mysteriously appears. Coraline is surprised to find a flat decorated exactly like her own, but strangely different. And when she finds her "other" parents in this alternate world, they are much more interesting despite their creepy black button eyes. When they make it clear, however, that they want to make her theirs forever, Coraline begins a nightmarish game to rescue her real parents and three children imprisoned in a mirror. With only a bored-through stone and an aloof cat to help, Coraline confronts this harrowing task of escaping these monstrous creatures.

Tim Burton is a movie-making god, just so everyone knows. He's had some movies that sort of missed with me—Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Sweeny Todd, for instance, but he didn’t come up with the idea for Sweeny, he was directing the movie-version of a musical, and Pee Wee was based on a character Burton didn’t create—but for the most part, I've adored his films. And he picks some of the best people to work on them, including Henry Selick. For those who don't know, Henry Selick is the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was the second Burton film that helped forge my love of the beautiful and bizarre (the first was Batman Returns; Catwoman was my idol as a kid).

So Henry Selick is totally amazebeans. And he's also the director of Coraline. I love the film Coraline, and I love the book by Neil Gaiman…which is why I'm reviewing it! The book, not the movie. I read the book ages ago and when the film came out, I nearly had a heart attack of sheer epical happiness.

One thing I love about Neil Gaiman's attitude about Coraline is his distinction between adults and children. According to Mr. Gaiman, adults consider Coraline a horror story, but kids consider it a great adventure book. I must be a kid then (my mother-in-law once told a friend of hers that I was "one of them," meaning her two young daughters, because all three of us were jumping around crying, "Rise of the Guardians! Rise of the Guardians! Rise of the Guardians!") because I don't think Coraline is scary at all. I mean, the bad guy—bad lady?—makes me gasp and cry, "Oh, crap!" But it doesn’t give me nightmares or anything. I love it. It's freaky. It's bizarre. It's awesome. I love it.

So Coraline has a lot going for it: it starts off almost immediately with her finding the door and everything, it has a cat (I love cats), the buttons-thing is just bizarre, and it plays on something a lot of kids fantasize about—finding your "real" parents who of course treat you better than the parents you're living with, who give you all the things you really deserve and let you do all the things you want to that your current set of parents forbid. It's an awesome story.

I only have one real issue with Coraline. I get that she just moved to the new place and everything, but why doesn’t she have any friends her own age? Are there really no children around at all? In the movie we meet Wyborne (aka Wybie) before Coraline even finds the door to the Other Mother's house, but in the book she has no one she considers a friend. She's surrounded by adults. It's a fairly lonely adventure, seems to me. When I was a kid, if new kids moved into the neighborhood, our parents made us go out and say hello, try to make them feel welcome. That happened when I moved as a little kid. It's how I made my first two "friends" (they weren’t really my friends, but that took a while to figure out, and in the meantime, we did stuff together). So why doesn’t Coraline have any friends or child-acquaintances in the book? That's the only thing that gives me pause, and considering this book is middle-grade, it probably won't give any kids in that age group even a hitch. I just thought it needed pointing out.

All in all, Coraline gets 4/5 stars. The friend-thing throws me off, and it could have been a little longer while still staying in the middle-grade length. I like me some long books. So there's that. But all in all, I love it!

And everybody should read it and watch the movie—unless you're easily scared, in which case you probably shouldn’t.

See you later,

LA Knight