Coraline: What Do You Mean It's For Kids?

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Coraline: What do you mean it’s for kids? As a whole, humanity is fascinated with the darker side of human nature. We are constantly exploring and trying to learn more about our darker halves. This is explored in an essay entitled The Shadow Side of Everyday Life, written by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams. This fascination with the dark side has spilled over into popular media. This is especially present in Coraline, a short novel, written in 2002 by Neil Gaiman, about the titular Coraline, discovering that things are not always as nice as they may seem at first, after moving to a new home in the country. The author has a policy of not sugarcoating things for children, thus leading to the book having a rather dark tone to it. This of course leads to a belief that it is too dark and/or scary for the children that comprise the book’s target audience. The book begins with Coraline wandering around her new home, a tenement flat with several other flats in the building, bored and looking for something to do. In the process of which, she bothers both of her work at home parents, who send her to do minor, yet pointless, activities, such as counting the number of doors and windows in the flat. In the process of which, she finds a small, locked door in the storage room. She is able to get the key from her mother, only to find that the door leads to nothing, and that there is only a bricked up wall behind it, Coraline’s mother stating that it is a leftover from when the building was just a normal house, before it was turned into multiple flats. However, things do not end there. A few nights later, Coraline goes back to the door and opens it, finding that it now opens up to a tunnel. Being a curious girl, Coraline ventures down the tunnel to see where it leads. At the end of the tunnel she finds herself in a room very much like the one she left, though there is something

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