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Junior Fiction
Bloomsbury
Paperback £5.99
ISBN: 0747562105
Reviewed by Mary Hoffman
[Armadillo 6.1 Spring 2004]
This paperback comes laden with high praise from Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Diana Wynne Jones and Lemony Snicket. And we know that the film rights have been sold. We also know that Gaiman is the author of the groundbreaking Sandman comics and co-wrote, with Pratchett, the sublime Good Omens.
So we expect a lot. And we get, well, some of it. It is a very disturbing book indeed, the tale of a girl whose name bears a clue to the whole story. Nothing is quite as it seems and it is a bad mistake to think she is an ordinary Caroline.
Coraline discovers a parallel life through a door in her drawing room, that sometimes opens on to a brick wall but at others leads into a Looking-Glass world that makes Lewis Carroll seem as ordinary as light-bulbs. In Coralines alternative existence, her parents have buttons for eyes, the mother is evil and the father is a mere simulacrum. The ĝOther mother" steals childrens souls and Coraline must rescue three others as well as herself.
She is triumphantly successful, with the resourceful bravery we expect of child heroines, but the reader is less likely to remember that than the Jungian horrors of the Dopelganger motifs. And, after all the praises heaped upon it, I found it disappointingly slight.