A universally good book - "Coraline"

Madie's Margins

4.5 stars

Happy spooky season, everyone! The scariest thing of all is unexpected spoilers, and this review will be full of them, so this is your warning!

One of my strongest opinions is that children have higher emotional intelligence than we credit them for, and also, that they’re very disturbed individuals. I think “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman perfectly encapsulates this phenomenon.

Coraline is an imaginative girl, a bit small for her age, who is never taken seriously by the grown-ups around her. One day, while bored, Coraline finds a passageway behind a door that was had previously been bricked over. This takes her to a parallel world of unsettling creatures with paper-white skin and buttons for eyes posing as more interesting and attentive versions of her family and neighbors.

Even from the whimsical get-go of the other world, there’s a marked creepiness. The Other Mother is especially frightening, with hair that moves on its own and really spooky slender hands. She also commits some absolute atrocities, such as deforming the world around her until it looks like a child’s drawing filled with mist and leaving the Other Neighbors deteriorating with whatever sentience they have, guarding the trapped souls of the children she had previously killed.

I also really enjoy Coraline. She’s everything a children’s story protagonist should be;, clever, brave, selfless, and comedic. I enjoy her perspective, and I can see how I would have related to her if I had read this at the target audience. But I didn’t read this book as a child, and I don’t think I would have been allowed to.

The fact of the matter is that “Coraline” is scary. It’s so disturbing that it almost wasn’t published, as it was deemed inappropriate for the children it was marketed to. It was only published after Gaiman convinced his literary agent to read it to her daughter to see if she was scared.

But she wasn’t. She finished the entire book, and she loved it! TSo the book was published, and ten 10 years later Gaiman spoke to the daughter, telling her the book only got published because she wasn’t scared of it. That’s when the agent’s daughter revealed that she was, in fact, terrified, b. But if she stopped because she was scared, she would never know what happened next.

I read plenty of scary things when I was younger. I vividly remember being freaked out by “Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets,”, right before bedtime. , but iInstead of stopping, I made sure I was really quiet, so my parents wouldn’t tell me to go to bed, and I could find out what happened next. I got over it. “Chamber of Secrets” is now my favorite Harry Potter book, because I’m weird like that. Lots of kids are.

So “Coraline” might scare a kid, but they also might like it anyway.? When I was in elementary school, my friends and I would compete over who had read the darkest book, and this book would have been a feather in my cap.

“But Madie, we’re not elementary schoolers.” So what? Whenever I see someone turn their nose up at a good book because it has a young target audience, I want to hit them with my set of Lemony Snicket books until they get some sense knocked into them.

You can enjoy a good book at any age! Why are you going to let yourself be limited by what society says you can read? “Coraline” is a phenomenal novella. I, it’s disturbing in all the right ways, it’s cathartic, and well-paced. It can be accessible to children and still have value for the older reader, and you can probably find even more value in it from your new literary high ground.

Just remember, don’t accept buttons from strangers!