Kevin Potter

First, let me just say that I'm honestly impressed with Neil's audiobook narration. While it did leave something to be desired in terms of inflections and variety of voices, he did a much better job than I expected when I realized he narrated it himself. Although I have seen the movie, I will do my best not to make any comparisons between the two. Coraline herself is an interesting, if generally unhappy and conflicted character. I couldn't get an exact sense for how old she is meant to be, but based on her general attitudes and actions, I'm guessing somewhere in the 9-12 range. Unfortunately, for me at least, no one else in the book really had a face. Each character had one or two well-chosen details to add a bit of depth, but none of them felt real. It was almost as though each was just a set piece. At its heart, this book feels a bit like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Tim Burton's The Corpsebride. A little dark, a little scary, and completely crazy. My biggest frustration with it, I think, is she sheer amount of telling and expository backstory. A huge chunk of the opening pages are just telling us what has been happening recently and who people are, instead of showing us a day in Coraline's life to let us experience where she is and who these people are. Gradually, we get ever-greater glimpses into what's really going on and we get to see the true strength of Coraline's character. I do feel like the narrative could have benefited from one or more additional characters (that we actually get to know) as counterpoint to Coraline herself. In the end, this is a reasonably entertaining story that does some nice digging into the nature of humanity, but I would have liked to have seen something with a lot more depth.