Coraline - Neil Gaiman

Coraline
Author: Neil Gaiman
http://www.neilgaiman.com/
Reviewer: Joseph

As people who are familiar with his Sandman books will know Neil Gaiman has a twisted sense of reality. Gaiman takes the old theme of a child stepping into a wonderland through a parallel dimension and horribly distorts it. Coraline is a modern fairytale where nothing is as it seems and reality is distorted. In Coraline the young protagonist is drawn to adventure the area around her house because of boredom. The weather is horrible, it constantly rains and is foggy, there are no other children in her neighbourhood, and her parents completely ignore her. She is drawn to a mysterious door in her house that supposedly leads to no where. It is locked and has a brick walll on the other side as she finds out. But when her parents are gone and she finds the key it turns out to be a sort of mirror world where her mother is loving and a brilliant cook, her neighbours are beautiful entertainers, and she plays with friendly rats from the man upstairs. This world seems perfect until she realizes that she is a pawn in a game this other mother has played for years. Coraline is at once a fairy tale, an adventure story, a mystery, and a cautionary tale. It features some extremely interesting characters including a talking cat who guides Coraline, two neighbours who give Coraline the key to her victory against the other mother, a man upstairs who has a band of musical rats (mirrored by the evil rats in the alternate reality), and a father who can’t cook. This book quickly became one of my favourites. And Neil Gaiman also plans to release this book as a graphic novel later this year even though the illustrations by Dave Mckean in the regular version are fantastic.

Coraline is coming out as a film in 2009



And here is a sneak peek we found on YouTube: