It's Gaiman and McKean, so it's a gorgeous object, and it reads well, but after a strong opening set around Helena's father's slapdash circus, halted in its tracks by the illness of Helena's mother, leaving them stuck in her Nan's apartment in Brighton, it takes off into a surreal quest through a sort of dreamworld that feels sketchy and rushed, with characters, ideas and settings that are woefully underdeveloped and a story that feels like a particularly shallow paint-by-numbers fairy-tale, and you tend to wish you were back in the apartment with the stranded circus, which was much more interesting. Thematically, the whole thing feels like an early draft of Coraline. Possibly it all works better in the film?