Thursday, January 4, 2007

Coraline by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean

Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins (July 2, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0380977788
ISBN-13: 978-0380977789
List Price: $15. 99

I read this little book the other night, and I must admit that I had to sit up to finish it so I could know whether or not this book had a happy ending. The reading level for this book is listed at about 9 - 12 but I must confess that this gore loving scary movie junkie totally got the creepies from it.
Little Coraline is very smart, very bored, and very ignored by her parents. As you can probably guess this a bad combination and she gets into trouble. She finds a door to another version of her apartment with another version of her parents, who are waiting to make her theirs. Except they have buttons for eyes. That's right buttons for eyes. Does that give anyone the heebie jeebies other than me? Yikes. Anyway, they keep getting creepier and creepier until Coraline has to fight her way out.
In a related note why can't my cats talk like the one in this book? They would be more interesting, even if they only said 'feed me'.
I also found from some preliminary poking that this is going to be an animated movie with Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher. I have some problems with this. I know DF is really cute and talented but does she have to be in every child role ever? I also would like to see her tackle some older parts because I think she could really pull it off. Oooh, sorry, this is a book blog. But you can probably expect that I will talk about movies made from books I've read, just to let you know. But I think that the movie could be really cool, so I'll be sure to keep you updated.
This book was cool and creepy and definitely worth the short time it took to read.

1 comment:

Carl V. Anderson said...

She'll just be doing the voice-over though because this is going to be animated by Henry Selick, the guy who did James and the Giant Peach and produced the Tim Burton stop-motion stuff as well. It should be very cool. At least I hope so. I have more faith that this will be a good book-to-film adaptation than I do for Stardust.

Its a wonderful little book, isn't it? This is one that I want to pick up on CD with Neil reading it. Although there is also a version with Dawn French reading it and I love her and would like to have that one as well.