A creepier young adult novel about a girl who wanders into the shadowier side of her life
by Neil Gaiman
Genre / themes: Family, supernatural, alternate reality, imagination
Art level: Pretty good. Not outstanding, but not bad either. All in colour, quite flat looking.
Star Rating: 4 Stars
Number of Books: One.
Other notes: Adaptation of Neil Gaiman's original novel (which won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novella for the year 2003, and also won the Locus Award, the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Work for Young Readers and the 2002 British Science Fiction Award for short fiction) and recently made into an animated film in 2009.
See this title on AmazonThe Coraline novel is also available for the Kindle.
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My Review
Coraline is for older children, young adults and anyone who likes Gaiman's slightly scary take on everything he writes. I got my dad this for his birthday, and it has been reread by both siblings and him several times since then - and is looking a bit battered! Coraline is a little girl who is lonely and imaginative and wanders into the wrong part of her new house - where she meets her creepy Other Mother and Other Father.
Her Other Mother at first provides her with everything she wants, including a great deal of attention - but then gets too creepy for Coraline, who runs home. Unfortunately, her Other Mother doesn't approve of this, and steals her parents away. Coraline has to return and face down her Other Mother in order to rescue them. If she can find where they are hidden.
The other Coraline books, and the movie.
Have you seen the animation? I am a fan of Neil Gaiman, only through his Sandman series. In fact, I didn't know he had written Coraline when I saw the movie; I haven't read the novel either. Do you know about the differences between the adaptation and the original?
ReplyDeleteI actually just saw it - by sheer chance! There are differences, such as the fact that Coraline in the animation is more of a spunky selfish girl, while the book-Coraline is a quiet (but still stubborn) loner. the move also has a lot more characters - less of the neighbours, but all the weird and wonderful magic that is created 'for Coraline' by the Other Mother is new. More entertaining, but less thoughtful, I guess? It's a good adaptation, and most of the changes are very minor (e.g. the jumping gerbil-mice are a sort of cute meld of the original mice and the rats from the book), and the doll is new - but a very good explanation of a plot hole I hadn't really noticed before, but simply attributed to general creepiness (that is, how DID Other Mother know what to offer Coraline?)
ReplyDeleteI guess the biggest change, to me, was the cat not being a random stray, and the introduction of Wybie as a random annoying sidekick/plot mover/ friend for kids to emphasise with.
The animated version is more obviously aimed at kids - but it ends up feeling the same, and I wouldn't rate either the graphic novel or the film as better or worse (I haven't read the original novel, to be clear - it's possible some of the new elements in the film were dropped for the graphic novel - but I don't think so).