millinocket's Full Review: Neil Gaiman and Raquel Vazquez Ramil - Coraline
As a kid, living in the suburbs in a standard suburban house, I thought of how fabulous it might be to live somewhere with a history, with secrets and hidden stairways and doors behind bookcases. Short of figuring a way around child labor laws and buying myself such a place, my best shot at experiencing one of these mysterious houses was to read about them. Seems I’m still doing that. I recently stumbled on Coraline, a book written for older elementary school aged kids written by Neil Gaiman. That was enough to spark my interest, having read and enjoyed American Gods, but then to discover it was all about just my sort of house – well, let’s just say that we don’t always buy kid’s books for our kids.
Coraline – not Caroline, people - Coraline - has recently moved into a new house. Well, to be fair, they don’t own the whole house and it really isn’t new at all. She and her parents have moved into a flat in an old, old house, one with a garden filled with old, old things and other flats filled with odd, odd people. The sisters Miss Spink and Miss Forcible inhabit one flat, talking almost exclusively about their glorious past on that stage; though they do seem to have some sort of special radar about certain missteps that may await Coraline. Upstairs is a man who talks of little else but his mouse circus. Even though Coraline is sure he’s crazy, there is something about the whole mouse thing that seems to get under her skin.
What Coraline decides to do with her few weeks of freedom before beginning at a new school is explore. That garden has potential, with its overgrown tennis courts and old, covered up well. But not every day is sunny and warm, leaving Coraline to explore her flat one rainy, cold afternoon. What she discovers is a door. A locked door behind which sits a brick wall. No one seems to know what is behind the wall, nor do they much care. Her mother even goes so far as to nearly leave the door unlocked. Coraline, being a curious sort of girl, can’t get that door out of her head. When she next opens it, she finds that it isn’t what it seemed at first, not at all. There is something there, a world both familiar and not, that would like her to come and play - and never leave.
Personally, as an adult-type person, I enjoyed Coraline. It’s creepy and spooky and filled with lots of fog and peril and lost souls. Coraline is an engaging heroine with the kind of natural curiosity that makes us we understand how her distracted parents simply would not be enough to keep her happy in a strange place on a rainy day. In fact, the opening sequences are written so well that we would go down that passageway, too, just to find out what might be there. The vague warnings of danger and the overall strangeness of the entire house just whets our appetite for what might come next. She may be a child, but Coraline has the kind of universal curiosity about the odd and unusual that we can all relate to. She also doesn’t act out childishly; rather she is quite grown up in her approach to her situation and eventual predicament.
Gaiman knows how to pull a reader into a story. Even with its relatively simple vocabulary and short chapters, the character of Coraline is well developed and sympathetic. The story moves at a crisp pace and keeps us engaged throughout – seldom lagging into unnecessary dialogue or description. An especially appreciated aspect of a book geared toward small folk who don’t always have the patience to wade through page after page of set-up before getting to the meat of the story.
That said, I’m not sure that the book is particularly well suited to its target audience (say, 9-12 year olds). Oh, it’s certainly written at a level absolutely appropriate for the older elementary child, and the pacing and main character are sure to appeal to this crowd. But…….it’s too adult. Not in that there are “adult situations” or anything even remotely of the sort. It’s simply that the story is very scary and too vague. Even the illustrations by Dave McKean aren’t quite right – they’re just that added touch of disturbing that kind of puts the book over the edge. Once Coraline goes through that passageway, she enters a world where nothing is quite right. She quickly understands that this is not a place that she wants to be, but circumstance dictates that she remain. Gaiman makes this place a subtle yet disturbing house of horrors, where children lose their souls, where people masquerading as your parents want to replace your eyes with buttons, where rats scamper about whispering frightening incantations.
The scare factor alone isn’t all that much of an issue. After all, scary books are the staff of life for a lot of kids (I know - I was one). Where Coraline fails its intended audience is in the fleshing out of the story. Too much about what happens to Coraline goes without adequate explanation. We never do find out exactly what that is back there or why it’s there or how it does what it does. As an adult, that adds to the delicious spookiness of it all. There is plenty of innuendo and suggestion on which to hang a theory or two, letting the adult reader use their dusty old imagination and come up with their own answers, always a fun task. A child, however, is likely to want more resolution – more concrete answers, a better wrap-up, more reassurance in the outcome. Put it all together, the scary story, the scary illustrations and the unsettling lack of answers in the end, and I think what you get is a book better suited to a slightly older audience, or the more precocious among the younger set. The simple vocabulary and short chapters (short overall length as well) would perhaps appeal to a reluctant older reader – someone who is ready for more complex storytelling but has difficulty with an adult text level. It’s also perfectly suited to an adult (like me!) who cares little for what level the book is written at, but enjoys a good, creepy little story to pass a few hours. Neil Gaiman knows how to tell a story, he knows how to make it flow and keep it moving and make us invest in his main character. He just misses his mark by a few years here, leaving his tale a bit too abstract in its outcome. The best recommendation I can give is to buy it for yourself at the elementary school book fair (like me!) and enjoy – share it with your kids when they get a little older. In the meantime, keep looking for those hidden stairways and secret rooms; you never know where one might turn up…….
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...More at Audible.com
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