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��When you are scared, but you do it anyway, that's brave.��

There are few villains that still frighten me to this day quite like the button-eyed Other Mother of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. While, sure, this is a book for younger readers, but Coraline is a terrifying little tale that even adults can take to heart and feel inspired by 9year old Coraline as she learns that being ��being brave didn’t mean you weren’t scared,�� as Gaiman explains in his forward, ��being brave meant you were scared, really scared, badly scared, and you did the right thing anyway.�� This twisted coming-of-age story examines finding oneself as well as a sense of home, made all the more sinister when evil seeks to seduce you into their grasps by playing off of your loneliness and frustrations during periods of upheaval. Gaiman has crafted a delightfully spooky modern fairy tale that is sure to charm readers of any age with his whimsical imagination, foreboding vibes and empowering moral messages, and, best of all, his sharp and witty heroine, Coraline Jones.


I don’t care who you are, Other Mother/Bedlam is terrifying.

I recently reread Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House with my book club and spent a lot of time thinking about how the novel discusses fear as being something that isolates us from the not-afraid parts of us, and can isolate our minds from reality. In this way, the house isolates Eleanor and plays off her feelings of lacking a home and even a solid identity in order to take hold of her, writing ��come home�� in blood on the walls to tell her the haunted house was her real home. This made me think of Coraline and how the Other Mother baits her by being a warm and welcoming mother during a time when her family is in the chaos of a move and the usual family frictions children have as they seek more independence from their parents. I don’t know if Gaiman was inspired by Hill House at all, but the symmetry is there, and in both books to fall into the snare means to have your soul consumed. Fun stuff! This novel, however, is about how a young girl and a sassy cat are able to overcome the psychological traps, entering into the fairy tale are returning wiser and with a better idea of the self.

��Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she met made any sense,�� Gaiman writes, and much of the troubles arise because Coraline feels the adults in her life are failing her. This is a common theme in children’s fiction, and Gaiman embodies the trope masterfully with goofy neighbors and hijinks that make the adult world seem pretty lame and off putting. There is a great message at play in this book that even when relationships are rocky or stressed, people still love each other and the memories of this love can sustain you in your darkest hours. It is a beautiful sentiment, though when a demon is chasing you to devour your soul perhaps its better to take strength from it than bask in the mushy-goodness of it.

Gaiman also interrogates the idea of ‘home�� in Coraline, an apt discussion for a child who has just been uprooted from Michigan (in the amazing film version by Henry Selick, the Jones family owns a snowglobe of the Holland Lighthouse where I live, so that's cool). Through the novel we seem the concept of ‘home�� less as a physical space, and more an emotional one made up of good relationships with those around you. This is a good lesson to impart, and it is amusing to see Coraline connect with the strange neighbors living around her, though we see her impression of home become less welcoming each time she argues with her mother, pushing her closer and closer to the clutches of evil.

��Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.��
- G.K. Chesterton

I love the way Gaiman takes on fairy tale attributes here. Keys and mirrors are frequent in the book, and Coraline literally enters a mirror world at the risk of being trapped there forever. She also has three neighbors who she visits on both sides of the mirror, and cycles of 3 is a common motif in fairy tale narratives. He toys around with tropes in humorous ways to fit his themes of self-identity, such as in the mirror world where her neighbor can actually call her by the correct name but she is then told by the cat that names are meaningless. ��Now you people have names,�� he tells her, ��that's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.�� The idea of naming something in a fairy tale often means taking power over it, but here we see names as a placeholder until we can have power over ourselves. Clever riffing on fairy tale logic is part of what makes Coraline such a sheer delight.

This is a scary book though, Other Mother for real creeps me out, but Gaiman needed a creepy villain in order to bestow his biggest message: be brave. Life is scary, he tells us, and sometimes the only way to get through is to truly be brave. ��It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do,�� he writes as an example, ��but going back again..when he was really scared. That was brave.�� It is a lovely reminder that doing the right thing often means facing hardships and fears, but we should do it anyways. Coraline is a stunning little book and a perfect spooky season read.

4.5/5/

��Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.��