As Coraline’s quest picks up its pace, the parallel world she finds herself trapped in grows ever more monstrous, generating some deliciously eerie descriptive writing. Her ability to accept and cope with the surreality of the other flat springs from the child’s ability to accept, without question, the eccentricity and arbitrariness of her own-and every child’s own-reality. The narrative hews closely to a child’s-eye perspective: Coraline never really tries to understand what has happened or to fathom the nature of the other mother she simply focuses on getting her parents back and thwarting the other mother for good. “ No, I am brave.” When Coraline realizes that her other mother has not only stolen her real parents but has also stolen the souls of other children before her, she resolves to free her parents and to find the lost souls by matching her wits against the not-mother. This is Gaiman’s ( American Gods, 2001, etc.) first novel for children, and the author of the Sandman graphic novels here shows a sure sense of a child’s fears-and the child’s ability to overcome those fears. A drawing-room door that opens onto a brick wall becomes a natural magnet for the curious little girl, and she is only half-surprised when, one day, the door opens onto a hallway and Coraline finds herself in a skewed mirror of her own flat, complete with skewed, button-eyed versions of her own parents. 9-13)Ī magnificently creepy fantasy pits a bright, bored little girl against a soul-eating horror that inhabits the reality right next door.Ĭoraline’s parents are loving, but really too busy to play with her, so she amuses herself by exploring her family’s new flat. While Eager’s adventure isn’t thrilling, his discoveries about life, formed through amusing conversations with virtual reality Socrates, are thought-provoking. While contemplating the definition of life, Eager, Gavin, and Fleur discover something frightening about the BDC-4 robots and about LifeCorp in general. Grumps’s replacement is the experimental prototype Eager-a robot who has been programmed to think instead of following orders. Their parents decide to replace the faithful but flaky robot butler Grumps, so maybe Fleur and Gavin won’t be so embarrassed in front of their technocrat friends who have fancy new BDC-4 robots.

They don’t have the latest technology reserved for the wealthy technocrats who work for LifeCorp, but at least they don’t live in the city with all those made unemployable by robot labor. Like all professional families, theirs has a sentient house and a robot butler. Still, something is wrong in their class-stratified society. In siblings Fleur and Gavin’s world, where robots do all of the manual labor, there’s no starvation or homelessness.

Eager's Nephew by Helen Fox