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Coraline is a classic for young readers by Neil Gaiman, published in 2002.

It’s a captivating, dazzling, modern ghost story in which a young girl must face her darkest desires and learn to grow up in order to not be forced into a never ending childhood which definitely seems like a prison.

It all starts when Coraline moves into a new house with her parents – just three weeks before the beginning of a new school year.

Coraline’s mother and father are too busy to play with her so she spends lots of her free time exploring outside.

But one day while outside it is bucketing down rain, the young girl also goes to investigate the inside of her new apartment and she discovers an old door in the drawing room which apparently opens onto a brick wall.

Coraline is young – which means that she is curious and reckless – and she can’t resist unlocking the door again while nobody is home: so she sails past her own Pillars of Hercules to the open sea.

In fact, the door leads through a dark corridor to a different world, where – as in a sort of parallel universe – another mother and another father live.

They are identical to Coraline’s parents except for their gleaming black button-eyes and the fact that they want her to stay with them forever, swearing that they will take care of her if she decides to stay.

At the beginning Coraline is spellbound by her other mother’s personal wonderland, which she has just created to make Coraline’s dreams come true. But soon the young girl realizes that she is trapped in an apparently perfect world which is just an illusion, and she has to find a way to save herself and bring back her parents, who are imprisoned in a snow globe on the mantelpiece of the other house. This way she will get back her own lovely old way of life.

The dilemma with the other mother, who step by step reveals herself to be a ghastly monster, is a fight to the death and Coraline, even though she is small for her age, soon becomes tricky, brave and wise.

The expected happy-outcome finally arrives, but it is corrupted by the remote possibility that the other mother might return. In fact, a piece of her – the other mother’s right hand – dashes from the black musty corridor together with Coraline when she finally manages to escape from the misty, ghostly and flat other world to her own more certain reality.

So we can’t say if Coraline will have to struggle against her own darkest desires in the future.Does she want to be owned and loved as a knickknack on a mantelpiece, instead of growing up?

It could be a very dangerous desire for all of us, at any age.

For now, we leave her lying in her own bed on a sweet summer night while the mouses’ circus is playing, school is about to start in the morning and nothing seems to scare her anymore.

Coraline is an excellent book to be read at school, either in its original language or in a good translation: just like many others Bildungsroman – from Homer’s Odyssey to Alessandro Manzoni’s Betrothed – it teaches young adults some unavoidable moral values: self-confidence, bravery and wisdom. It also inspires them to be self-reliant. Being loved doesn’t mean to be just a possession, a “tolerated pet”.

Sometimes a tattered freedom it’s better than posh affective slavery.

Just like a new Proserpina – the Greek goddess of the underworld – Coraline eschews the other world and comes back home safe and sound, and even eating food in the underworld does not seem to stop her: she is a brilliant new Psyche in search of her own adulthood.

The novel is charmingly illustrated in the Italian edition by Dave McKean, but personally I prefer the British one, enriched with Chris Riddell’s lovely illustrations.

Elisa Lucchesi

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