Few author/illustrator teams have rendered a child's journey through the dark world with such psychological and emotional complexity as the duet of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Their stories are as eerie, scary, and thrilling for the child reader as they are for the adult. But more impressive than their rendering of ghastly fantasy worlds is their creation of the intrepid heroines who navigate them. With their novella Coraline, their picturebook The Wolves in the Walls, and their illustrated film script MirrorMask, Gaiman and McKean present their readers with three wildly courageous, loyal, resourceful, and emotionally strong female protagonists, who are resolved to rescue their families and homes from chaos and evil. Thrown into realms of distortion and illusion, Coraline, Lucy, and Helena glean information from their intuition and dreaming, and skillfully manipulate art, language, and narrative, in order to discern, define, and reclaim borders. Ultimately, these powerful heroine...
History
Journal
The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's Literature
ISSN
1551-5680
Volume
12
Issue
1
Publisher
La Trobe University
Section Title
Picture Window
Author Biography
Danya David has a B.A. from McGill University in English Literature and Cultural Studies, as well as a teaching degree from the University of Toronto with a specialization in deaf education. She was a panelist at the first annual Graduate Studies Interdisciplinary Conference at UBC, and reviews books for CM Online Magazine. Danya is currently completing her masters in Children's Literature at the University of British Columbia, focussing her research on Jewish content in graphic novels. She currently teaches at the Centre for Intercultural Communication at UBC
Date Created
2008-02-07
Rights Statement
Essays and articles published in The Looking Glass may be reproduced for non-profit use by any educational or public institution; letters to the editor and on-site comments made by our readers may not be used without the expressed permission of that individual. Any commercial use of this journal, in whole or in part, by any means, is prohibited. Authors of accepted articles assign to The Looking Glass the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently available electronically. They retain the copyright and, 90 days after initial publication, may republish it in any form they wish as long as The Looking Glass is acknowledged as the original source.
Data source
OJS data migration 2025: https://ojs.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/54
