Coraline

 

Maybe more known these days as a stop-motion movie of the same name, Coraline is the story of a young girl who love to explore. 

One day she travels through a bricked up door and enters a house that resembles hers a lot, and she meets her other mother. At first it seems quite fun to have a back-up mother until that other mother kidnaps her real parents and won't let Coraline go home again.

Coraline needs all her wits about her to escape the other mother and rescue her parents while she's at it. 

A fun story to read. It could be a children's book but it has some scary parts which make it not so suitable for little children. I think it's best described as a Children's Book for Adults. 

Norse Mythology

This was a very pleasant book!

I got to know a lot of these stories watching the Marvel movies, but it was fun nonetheless. Marvel didn't get everything to the point.. (probably for cinematic purposes)

Don't expect a fluent story where the gods are acting like heroes and such, but it's more like a collection of short stories, each ending with some kind of moral or trickery, if Loki is involved.

It seems almost a game of wits when the Gods venture up to something.
A promise between them is easily made, but as easily broken as well.

The more familiar character, such as Thor, Loki, Odin, Freya,.. are present in this book, but I got to know a few new names as well, with their interesting stories.

It's a novel filled with wonderful fables and I can recommend it to anyone who likes these tales of folklore.

Neverwhere

Imagine there's another London beneath the metropolis we all know, love and despise.
A London Below.

Where everything commonly known in city life takes on a new meaning.

Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere.(www.goodreads.com)

I loved this story of Gaiman, which has everything an old school adventure novel needs.
A great hero who begins as a stumbling lad. A girl. A quest. Villains.
And then the artful way of letting London Below leech onto the city we know.
Where tube map locations become literal in meaning (a real earl's court at Earl's Court, a giant called Hammersmith, a monastery at Black Friars)
Even a house that is a street.
It's all so fantastic that it becomes enchanting.

I've read other novels of Neil Gaiman before, of which The Graveyard Shift, American Gods and The Ocean at the End of the Lane are the more commonly known.
Neverwhere was the best I've read of him so far. It has the adventure of American Gods (which I found a little tedious) and The Ocean which left me with the impression I had from this one. It seems that every time I try a new Gaiman novel I'm upping the stakes.

Snippet from my review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane: 

You get to marvel in the innocence and grandeur of the world when you were in elementary school and experience this through the eyes of a 7y old. I've read Gaiman before, but this is his best novel I've read so far. It's truly mesmerizing. (http://touchofnovel.blogspot.be/2014/02/review-of-ocean-at-end-of-lane.html)

 Gaiman is the perfect solution for that little bit of innocent magic we all need in our lives from time to time. No glamour, no romance, no hidden agenda's, but an oldfashioned adventure. He makes me want to pick up my old favourites from when I 10 and newly experience them. Like I said before, he's the master of writing children's stories for grown-ups.

Review of The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what. (www.goodreads.com)

This was a great novel. It's quite short which is probably why is left such a good impression. The best way to describe this book, is that it's a children's book for adults. You get to marvel in the innocence and grandeur of the world when you were in elementary school and experience this through the eyes of a 7y old. I've read Gaiman before, but this is his best novel I've read so far. It's truly mesmerizing.

He explains in the beginning that it's a book about his childhood, the child you're following through this novel is based upon himself. We all have memories that seem too large for life, expanded from being not able to see everything in the right context. Someone we're scared of becomes a witch or a boogie man, something we can't explain becomes an adventure. What can I tell more? Read this little gem, it reads like a speed train and you'll be sorry when it's done but so much the richer for having read it and remembered some of your own adventures from way back then.

Personal score: 4 stars

Review of American Gods

Page count: 656 pages
First published in 2001
Personal rating: Fine

In short
American Gods is about religion. And not only the current religions. Just imagine the gods we worship and used to worship exist for real. What would happen if we moved on and forgot about them? Can a god exist without someone who believes in him? American gods  tries to answer that question.

My two cents
Too long, the novel was too long. I didn't dislike it, but it dragged on a little beyond what I felt was comfortable. Of course for the Gaiman fan that's nothing but A-okay.. (as I tend to feel about a Stephen King novel) but I'm not overly impressed with his writing.
Don't get me wrong, his style and technique are rocking, but I just can't seem to get into that story of his. I feel like I'm watching the story from above, or feel like I'm watching it on telly but with words. The graveyard book gave me the same feeling.

Not to mention that I went in expecting a whole other story. I actually thought it would be someting a little more apocalyptic, but in the end it even had the good ending.. Not a big fan of those.
All in all, not a bad story if you're into it, but I'm glad I finished it. I'm actually happy I finished it, it looked bleak at some time.