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Review: Coraline
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Coraline cover.
Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, is a children’s book about a young girl who must save her parents from an evil creature who masquerades as the “other mother.” There has recently been a lot of hype about this story because of the recent movie adaptation. Avid readers may cringe because I did it backwards with this book, I saw the movie first. In my defense, it was because I did not know that Coraline was a book. I should have known because I was impressed (at first) at the ingenuity of the film’s writers. Once I looked up the film’s credit list, I found out the truth. The best movies always seem to have been books first.
The first thing that stuck me about Coraline is that it is, through and through, a children’s book. I’m always skeptical of people in charge of labeling book genres. They seem to get it wrong most of the time and books that shouldn’t be anywhere near kids make it onto the “Intermediate Readers” shelves. Books about children are not always for children, a la The Book Thief, but that’s another post. Coraline is meant for children, in that it is a simple story that is easy to read. The book consists of the plot, and that’s about it. This isn’t necessarily a bad aspect of the book, as the plot is very good, but what the reader misses out on is the emotional connection between themselves and the characters.
Coraline and the other characters in the book have very little to separate themselves from each other besides a name and a place they exist within the story. Some characters live with Coraline, others live downstairs, some live upstairs, etc. If a reader was asked to describe Coraline after reading the book, they would be hard pressed to come up with definitive adjectives describing her character. The reader could say that she is brave, but this is only evident by her actions, and they could say she is polite, but this is only deduced by her manner of speech. Coraline has little to no inner monologue and Gaiman does not provide any at all. What we’re left with is a moving picture of the events in Coraline and no insight into how any of the characters feel about them.
As far as emotional connections (a thing I value very highly in books), I found myself connecting more with the movie than the book. The book is a good bedtime story to read to children, but as far as a rewarding experience, it falls flat. In fact, that is a good one-word-summary for Coraline: flat. Read it to see where the movie came from, and then go see the film (which I recommend highly).
Happy Reading.
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