Deja Fu

Author: Neil Gaiman
Pages: 192
Year Published: 2002

On a cold and rainy day, Coraline, the book’s eponymous heroine, finds a mysterious door in the living room of her parent’s house. In her quest to satisfy her curiosity, Coraline will discover a strange, new world and be forced to undertake a quest to save her own parents when they vanish without a trace.

Coraline begins remarkably like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A small girl, left to her own devices, finds a portal to an alternate world. However, from there the books rapidly diverge from one another. Coraline contains none of the Christian allegory so famously employed by C.S. Lewis. Coraline is also on her own for the most part – a cat being her only ally in her struggle. Rather than trying to save an entire world, her struggle is much more close and personal. This makes it less epic, but more intimate than Lewis’ classic.

Of course, it’s Gaiman’s writing that brings the worlds alive and even in this young adult novel, he does so admirably. His ability to create worlds has always been one of the stronger aspects of his writing. There are some tiny flaws though. Apart from Coraline, the other characters are sketches of people, rather than fully drawn and behave according to type. The quest itself is fairly straightforward and anyone who has read Campbell will recognize its different stages.

However, even with those minor complaints, I still found it to be a well done story. In just a few years my niece will be old enough to start reading his works and this will definitely go on the list. Coraline will be a nice transition from his younger reader books like The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and his more adult fare.

-K