Neil Gaiman's young stuff...

Coraline is Neil Gaiman's first drop in to the fairy tale world of young adult fiction (listed as for ages eight and up - I'd probably go no young than that and might be leary of immature eight-year olds because there are scary moments here and there).

As is often the case, I listened to Coraline on cd, and Gaiman's performance is spectacular, providing just the right creepy notes for the characters in the looking glass world of the Other Mother but still being comforting enough so that the listener is never quite in true fear.

In the book, Coraline - an adventurous, often-bored-with-her-own-life, small-for-her-age girl, wanders through a door in her family's new flat - a door that is supposed to be bricked up on the other side but that Caroline finds leads to a mirror world populated by not-quite-right versions of the people in her own house, most particularly by the Other Mother, the wicked witch of this story. At first, Coraline's visit is exciting and entrancing as she wishes that her world were more like the exciting world that she has found. On her return to her world, however, she finds that her mother and father have been kidnapped and taken through to the mirror world. Coraline sets out to rescue her parents and finds three other souls to help along her way. In her journies, she finds out what is truly valuable and finds within herself a reserve of strength and courage that she had previously doubted.

As an adult reading the story, I found the pacing a little odd (particuarly the last third of the story when the villianess had been vanquished but Coraline found herself with one last remnant to clear up), but I would imagine that most younger readers would find the pacing perfect because it does resemble to some extent the storytelling methods of younger people in which the story continues just past where you might expect the classic progression of climax and short declining action. In this volume, Gaiman allows the declining action to rerise to a second climax, smaller but no less enjoyable than the first.

Faiman has also ommitted many details from the storyline, details that an adult reader might be looking for but that I imagine a younger reader would simply take at face value.

Overall, this is deserving of its place in the canon of modern classics of children's literature. It's another in Gaiman's line of gripping and incredibly well-crafted tales, slightly lesser than his Sandman storyline, but no less important in its field.