Coraline and Other Stories

Definitely creepy, honestly a little surprised it's marketed as juvenile fiction. Granted, there's nothing super horrible that happens, but some of the imagery I could totally see scaring the little ones pretty bad.

I was confused having watched the movie first, because Wyborn is not in the book. The movie is pretty dang true to the book, so I had to look into it to see why a whole character was made for the movie. Apparently, he was made to fill the gaps in the movie where Coraline's thoughts were on the page. So it's at least understandable. Honestly I felt like Coraline literally being on her own to get everything figured out and get away from the other mother added some additional suspense to it.

It is nice to have a character that is scared but still manages to put on a brave face and meet the challenges head on.

This is one that I'll be saving and revisiting another time. The audiobook with the full cast was amazing, cannot recommend it enough!

Coraline is a children's book good enough to be organically read by adults. As it's fairly similar to the movie, I'll cover some not-so-obvious interpretations I had:

Throughout the read I couldn't help but feel like Coraline's other mother was a perfect embodiment of a BPD parent. Aside from the obvious BPD characteristics exhibited by the other mother, I felt the following quote summed everything up beautifully: "It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon love its gold. Int the other mother's button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing."

After reading the book, I found a great blog analysis that touched on the many thoughts I had throughout the read: pensievely.wordpress.com/2020/12/17/seduced-by-borderline-an-analysis-of-coraline/

BPD-aside, very fun book. Made me laugh a few times, a bit creepy, and was nice to finally read the book. I adore the movie.

Coraline slips into some kind of parallel version of the new house she has moved into with her parents, where there are copies of everything and everyone that she knows of in the real world, even of her mother and father, who are called 'her other mother' and 'her other father'. But there is one big difference: each copy is some sort of distorted mirage with black button eyes of the real version, and everything there is much more exciting, but also much more scary. And one of these things has kidnapped her parents.

She has to go through several creepy encounters with those monsters to save her parents. While doing this she is far from being fearless, she is actually terribly scared. But Coraline summons her bravery out of love for her parents and out of her desire to save them and that is what makes this book so creepy and beautiful at the same time.

And it also gives us the important message, that being brave doesn't mean you aren't scared. It means you are scared and do the right thing anyway. Something that author Neil Gaiman wanted to tell his daughters, for whom he has written the book.