Book Review: Coraline

I must admit that the only other book by Neil Gaiman that I’ve read is The Graveyard Book, but I enjoyed that Newbery-winning novel so much that I wanted to check out some of his other work. Coraline, being his other children’s novel, popped out at me and I ordered a copy.

I have to say that as I read through the first fifty pages or so, I found myself feeling a little disappointed. The story is cute enough, but prose is more sparse and in my opinion, isn’t as clever as The Graveyard Book. One of my favorite aspects of that novel is that Gaiman often cleverly identifies the cemetary residents by their full tombstone inscriptions ("Miss Letitia Borrows, Spinster of this Parish, Who Did No Harm to No Man all the Dais of Her Life. Reader, Can You Say Lykewise?" for example). It’s little touches like that which help to make The Graveyard Book such an entertaining read. The prose of Coraline lacks that sense of unique whimsy.

The plot itself is quite whimsical, though; I felt at first as though I were reading another version of Alice in Wonderland – there’s even a talking feline, just like the Chesire Cat. Children will love all the strange creatures, as evidenced by the fact that this was a Children's Choice Award-winner in 2003. But while I enjoy Lewis Carroll well enough, a bastardized version of Alice didn’t appeal to my mood too much at the moment that I began reading Coraline. Gaiman’s version begins very similarly as Carroll's – but instead of going down the rabbit hole, Coraline opens a door that supposedly leads from her family’s flat into the empty flat next door and finds that it is a portal to a mirror universe. There, everything is a little distorted and a little bit more fantastic than in Coraline’s real world. This could be a great story concept in theory, but I wasn’t too keen on the performance that Miss Spink and Miss Forcible put on for the horde of dogs, who are eagerly wriggling and impatient to escape from their seats. Everything in that scene seems a little too contrived for my tastes – although it could have been my mood.

Even so, I found other aspects of Gaiman’s mirror universe to be interesting enough to keep reading. When she first walks through the passageway, Coraline discovers her “other mother” and “other father” living in a flat nearly identical to her own home. Nearly identical, but not quite. Coraline’s “other parents” have prepared everything in their flat so that the meals, toys and activities are geared toward pleasing and a entertaining child. Coraline’s other mother and father apparently want to adopt her for their own (there isn’t “an other” Coraline”) and are willing to give Coraline anything she would like that would make her happy. Or at least anything that they think will make her happy – anything that would please an average child.

But apparently Coraline isn’t your average child. She has some spunk, which will please readers – and she buys in to a moral that will please parents as well. She makes a rather tiresome, didactic-sounding speech, informing her other Mother: “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.” In moments like these, Coraline seems a little bit too cookie-cutter to be a fully satisfying character.

But ultimately, I’m willing to forgive the more trite aspect(s) of her character because once the mirror world is revealed to be essentially a Spider’s web, the story takes a more interesting turn. Welcome to Alice in Wonderland meets The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Coraline discovers that her “other mother” has tried to lure other children into her home before, and ultimately, these poor kids have been locked in the closet until they withered away. All that’s left of them are faint wisps of their souls – but Coraline is determined that she will not meet the same fate. As I said, she’s spunky. With the help of the talking cat, she challenges her other mother in order to try to win her escape and off she goes on a treasure hunt.

Ultimately, while Gaiman’s novel is something of a mish-mash of children’s literature tropes, they are combined in such a way that Coraline is both a cute and creepy novel, entertaining although not quite as absorbing as it could be. It’s an interesting precursor to The Graveyard Book and also stands on its own fairly well, but still isn’t as masterful as Gaiman’s Newbery winner. Even so, it’s enjoyable and worth reading – even more so for children –and now I'm fairly curious to see the movie.

This post participates in the Weekly Geeks Reading Challenge for February 20, 2011.

Book Review: The Graveyard Book

One dark and horrible night, the man named Jack breaks in to the Dorian house with the intent to murder the entire family. He kills Mr. and Mrs. Dorian and their daughter, but the young baby boy eludes him when he toddles up the hill to the graveyard and into the protective arms of the kindly ghosts Master and Mistress Owens. When the desperate specter of Mrs. Dorian appears to Mistress Owens, begging her to care for the baby, the residents of the cemetery decide to give the young boy the Freedom of the Graveyard and the kind of magical protection that only the dead can offer. When the man named Jack comes looking for the baby, the boy simply fades before his eyes and the vampire-in-residence uses his charms to convince the murderer that he is looking in the wrong place for his prey; baby Dorian is safe for the time being.

The Newbery-winning The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman follows the young boy, who is christened “Nobody Owens” and is raised in the graveyard by his new parents, the doting Master and Mistress Owens, and his solemn guardian Silas. Silas is the only resident of the graveyard able to go out into the world and obtain food and clothing for the boy, but he is also the graveyard resident who is the most truthful and straightforward with young Nobody, also known as “Bod.” The first half of the book is filled with Bod’s adventures as he grows up amongst the tombstones and mausoleums – he makes friends with the ghost of a young witch; he is kidnapped by ghouls who want to turn him into one of their own; he takes part in the eerie tradition of the Danse Macabre, the mysterious dance between the living and the dead that only occurs in the town once every eighty years.

These chapters of Bod’s life are fascinating in and of themselves – Gaiman does an excellent job of creating a paranormal world that is both familiar and unique, and characters that are quite charming for ghosts, vampires, werewolves and the like. Bod is quite comfortable in the world of the dead, and so is the reader – the opening scene of the Dorian family’s murder may have been quite chilling, but many of Bod’s other adventures are PG-rated. We are drawn into the story by the frightening mystery of the man named Jack wielding his sharp, glinting knife – but we remain engaged with the novel because of Bod’s disarming sweetness and desire to understand the graveyard – and the rest of the world – around him. As he bumbles and explores, we realize that this is not only a first-rate paranormal tale, but a well-written coming-of-age novel as well.

The subject of Bod’s maturity becomes the more obvious focus following the Danse Macabre, after which the young boy begins to realize that he is really does not belong in the cemetery, despite the fact that he loves and is loved by the graveyard residents. He is fundamentally different from Master and Mistress Owens, Silas and all the others – he has the potential to go out into the world and alter the course of events, to experience change, to truly live. Bod cannot remain in the graveyard forever – he must join the society of the living.

It is at that point, then, that he and his guardian Silas must deal with the fact that there is still someone who wants to kill him. If Bod is ever to live on his own, outside of the graveyard, the threat must be eliminated. The residents of the graveyard do not know the identity of the man Jack, nor why he was after the Dorian family and the baby boy, so Silas and some of Bod’s other protectors go off in search of answers. But while Silas is gone, the man named Jack and his cohorts come closer and closer to the graveyard, closer to discovering Body’s hiding place of the past thirteen years. Ultimately, Bod must face some of Jack’s associates himself if he is to become an adult, capable of taking care of himself.

As Bod slowly grows from a young toddler to a thoughtful, clever young man, the paranormal elements of the story do not grow any less creative and interesting – yet the focus of the story shifts to Bod himself. His fear, confusion and determination to face down both his school-yard enemies and his parents’ murderer seem realistic despite the fantastic world in which he lives; his desire for human companionship is touching. I love the way that Gaiman develops both his paranormal world and Bod's emotions with subtle language; his descriptions are engrossing and Bod's plight seems particularly vivid and realistic due to the craft of the author. I have never read anything else by Gaiman, but after twice through this novel, I’m eager to pick up some of his other books.

Excerpt: The Knife and the Man Jack

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.

The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man was on the bedroom floor, the other child in her brightly colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done.

. . . . .

The man Jack's eyes were accustomed to the dim moonlight, so he had no desire to turn on an electric light. And light was not that important, after all. He had other skills.

The man Jack sniffed the air. He ignored the scents that had come into the room with him, dismissed the scents that he could safely ignore, honed in on the smell of the thing he had come to find. He could smell the child: a milky smell, like chocolate chip cookies, and the sour tang of a wet, disposable, nighttime diaper. He could smell the baby shampoo in its hair, and something small and rubbery--a toy, he thought, and then, no, something to suck--that the child had been carrying.

The child had been here. It was here no longer. The man Jack followed his nose down the stairs through the middle of the tall, thin house. He inspected the bathroom, the kitchen, the airing cupboard, and, finally, the downstairs hall, in which there was nothing to be seen but the family's bicycles, a pile of empty shopping bags, a fallen diaper, and the stray tendrils of fog that had insinuated themselves into the hall from the open door to the street.

The man Jack made a small noise then, a grunt that contained both frustration and also satisfaction. He slipped the knife into its sheath in the inside pocket of his long coat, and he stepped out into the street. There was moonlight, and there were streetlights, but the fog stifled everything, muted light and muffled sound and made the night shady and treacherous. He looked down the hill towards the light of the closed shops, then up the street, where the last high houses wound up the hill on their way to the darkness of the old graveyard.

The man Jack sniffed the air. Then, without hurrying, he began to walk up the hill.

(Excerpt from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, Chapter One: How Nobody Came to the Graveyard.)

When I was a kid, I read every Goosebumps novel that my library owned. Then I graduated to the Fear Street series, also by R.L. Stine. I look back on those books now and wonder if they weren't a little repetitive, a little cliche. Stine's plots all involved things that dripped, oozed, shuddered, bumped and jumped out at you in the night. Perfect for sending chills down the spine of an eight year old.

But what about the story? What about the writing? Were they really any good?

Neil Gaiman's Newbery winning The Graveyard Book sends me into fits of shivers, not just because the idea of "the man Jack" stalking the baby is downright gruesome, but because Gaiman's writing is by turns haunting and amusing. Tendrils of fog and muted streetlamps are the stuff of many crime fiction novels and horror movies, but Gaiman employs them beautifully, mixing them in with less common descriptions like that of the baby's scent.

Inventive and well-written, The Graveyard Book is one of the best paranormal books for kids that I've ever read. (Full review to be posted either Friday or Saturday.)

What are your favorite paranormal books for kids? And how to do you feel about Gaiman versus R.L. Stine?