Review - Coraline

I bought this for my sister a while ago, and always meant to read it, but in the end I ended up reading it on the HarperCollins site, when they put it up as a free browse inside thing. It's up right now as I write this, but I don't know how long for. It is/was here, though.

Coraline is, I think, aimed at the youngest audience of all Gaiman's books that I've read. That doesn't stop it being slightly creepy, slightly weird, and full of trademark Neil Gaiman observations about things. I loved all the little comments about parents being dumb -- when you're little, parents are, aren't they? It's not often a child knows better, but sometimes they do. I'm still right with Coraline in thinking it's ridiculous to buy something huge in the hopes the kid'll grow into it someday. That's just tempting fate (as proved by me being a mere 5'3", after all my parents' hopes of me being very tall!).

Coraline's pretty short and easy to read, and wasn't even too bad to read on the screen like that. I wish there was more of it, in a sense, since I pretty much swallowed it down in one gulp, but on the other hand, it's just right as it is. It reminded me a little of MirrorMask.

Review - The French Lieutenant's Woman

I didn't expect to like this very much. A post-modern take on the Victorian novel? Victorian novels are awkward enough, sometimes, without adding post-modernism -- and besides, I'm not a fan of post-modernism. All that stuff about alienating the reader annoys me; why would I read something to be alienated from it? Fiction, for me, tends to go firmly in the escapism category, not the "making me think" category.

But John Fowles wasn't too heavy-handed about it. I didn't find it a chore to read, and it didn't take me very long at all. It's a kind of modern comment on Victorian sensibilities. The main characters are interesting enough. Mostly Sarah, since she's mostly kept an enigma.

The fact that it has the author as a character would mostly annoy me (see also: Money by Martin Amis), but actually, the intervention isn't all that annoying or alienating. The multiple endings are interesting, and even though I don't really like that device, I appreciate the point it makes about storytelling.

I'd probably have much more clever things to say about this if I waited until I started studying it, but... honest first reactions.