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belle_north's review
2.0
I know it's a book for young children. I know. But the PARENTS. My God, they were AWFUL. Pay attention to your child! Stop invalidating all their emotions! Absolutely infuriating. Also quite boring, which didn't help.
larrys's review
3.0
This is a book I would have read had I not stopped reading completely when I hit adolescence. (I regret this.) It was published when I was twelve and there was always something alluring about those American Apple paperbacks.
I started reading this to the eight-year-old last week but she lost interest after a chapter. For some reason I wanted to know what happened so I read it for myself.
An adolescent girl with slightly snarky behaviour is taken away to a new home, which turns out to be an abandoned old mansion with strange architectural details and quirky/eccentric elderly neighbours. The parents are basically absent though kind-hearted and the boy is not related and quite annoying, though their relationship mends over the course of the story. The plot quickly turns supernatural.
Does this remind you at all of a hugely successful, more recently written book by Neil Gaiman?
The tropes are in such close alignment that I figure there must be some classic gothic novel I haven't read upon which these two stories are both based.
Coraline is the more successful plot. This one is a bit of a fizzler. After the intriguing setting is established a bit more needed to happen. The big message at the end is: Be nice to younger (foster) siblings because your role in their happiness is more significant than you realise.
The message I got out of Coraline: No matter the short-comings of your parents, your own parents are still always better than the imagined other. I'm not sure I actually agree with that, because in real life some parents are assholes, but of course the filial piety message goes down well with the gatekeepers of children's literature, because there's a hell of a lot of kid books out there in which the parental figures are awful and irredeemable.
So while I probably prefer the message of The Scariest Night, the plot works better in Coraline, and the excellent movie adaptation only enhanced my enjoyment of that story.
Interesting that the character of the younger foster brother seem to be a clear example of a gifted kid with Aspergers, given that this book came out four years before the DSM-4.
Another small observation: A kid called Cowper would definitely not get the nickname of 'Cowbird' around these parts.
I started reading this to the eight-year-old last week but she lost interest after a chapter. For some reason I wanted to know what happened so I read it for myself.
An adolescent girl with slightly snarky behaviour is taken away to a new home, which turns out to be an abandoned old mansion with strange architectural details and quirky/eccentric elderly neighbours. The parents are basically absent though kind-hearted and the boy is not related and quite annoying, though their relationship mends over the course of the story. The plot quickly turns supernatural.
Does this remind you at all of a hugely successful, more recently written book by Neil Gaiman?
The tropes are in such close alignment that I figure there must be some classic gothic novel I haven't read upon which these two stories are both based.
Coraline is the more successful plot. This one is a bit of a fizzler. After the intriguing setting is established a bit more needed to happen. The big message at the end is: Be nice to younger (foster) siblings because your role in their happiness is more significant than you realise.
The message I got out of Coraline: No matter the short-comings of your parents, your own parents are still always better than the imagined other. I'm not sure I actually agree with that, because in real life some parents are assholes, but of course the filial piety message goes down well with the gatekeepers of children's literature, because there's a hell of a lot of kid books out there in which the parental figures are awful and irredeemable.
So while I probably prefer the message of The Scariest Night, the plot works better in Coraline, and the excellent movie adaptation only enhanced my enjoyment of that story.
Interesting that the character of the younger foster brother seem to be a clear example of a gifted kid with Aspergers, given that this book came out four years before the DSM-4.
Another small observation: A kid called Cowper would definitely not get the nickname of 'Cowbird' around these parts.
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