Coraline is an adventurous young girl. More than anything she just wants to stop being bored. There is nothing to do around the house, her parents are too busy to play with her, and the only other people around are two aging former actresses and a crazy old man who is trying to teach mice to play music. Coraline finally asks if she can go in the drawing room and her father tells her that she can, as long as she doesn’t touch anything. That is when she finds the door. She asks her mother where the door goes and her mother responds that it goes nowhere. She even opens the door and shows Coraline that there is a brick wall behind it. After the door has been opened everything begins to change. Coraline finds that there is a secret world behind the door. A world much more interesting than her own, where she has an other mother and other father. Coraline quickly learns that not everything is as it seems and things start to get a little too exciting, even for her.

      To be perfectly honest I am jealous of the stories that Neil Gaiman writes. Every story is odd but also enthralling. Gaiman writes incredible, paranormal stories about the strangest of things but still manages to make the strangeness exciting and every story leaves you only wanting to understand.

      Gaiman’s stories may be fantastical and whimsical but they all seem to tread a very thin line where they become almost believable. Coraline is a story about a little girl who gets lost in another world. Many of the plot elements seem reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and yet Gaiman is still somehow able to make the story his own. Coraline is really about being content with what you have and about seeing the beauty and adventure and greatness in ordinary things. Gaiman tells this story masterfully in maybe his most famous adventure.

      Now on to the bad of this book. I thoroughly enjoyed Coraline because it was a very good book. I noted early on that although it was similar to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland it did not quite meet the level of the timeless classic. Gaiman’s story quickly became too predictable to stand on the same level as Carroll’s children’s story. Where Gaiman is famous for being able to make up the most unfathomable of stories, he falls short of Lewis Carroll in that regard.

     Gaiman’s writing style in this book disappointed me but not unexpectedly. The word choice and sentence structure did not feel like Neil Gaiman to me and I know why. Coraline is, for the most part, a children’s story; like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The story had to be toned down in order to be presented to a younger audience. While I understand the reason for writing it as he did the style lacked a certain quality that I’ve come to enjoy and look for in Neil Gaiman’s stories.

Coraline was exactly what I expected it would be when I bought it, and so I was not disappointed. It is a harrowing children’s tale with a straightforward but interesting plot. As far as children’s stories go I would probably place it among the greats. As far as all stories are concerned I don’t know that it would crack even my top 50.

Fans of Neil Gaiman’s work might enjoy this book. I think the story I would most relate it to would be Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because it feels like that sort of a book. I think a lot of the reception of this books rests on what you expect going into it.

Favorite Quotation:
The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.