Selected Book
Coraline Movie Tie-in Edition
- Paperback
- Edition: Mti Rep
- Author: Neil Gaiman
- Artist: Dave Mckean
- Publisher: HarperFestival
- Release Date: November 2008
- Reading Level: Ages 9-12
- ISBN-10: 0061649694
- ISBN-13: 9780061649691
- List Price: $6.99
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryWhen Coraline explores her new home, she steps through a door and into another house just like her own . . . except that it's different. It's a marvelous adventure until Coraline discovers that there's also another mother and another father in the house. They want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to keep her forever! Coraline must use all of her wits and every ounce of courage in order to save herself and return home. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Compelling, disturbing and deliciously scary
Rating: 
I had never heard of Coraline until I read about it on a book blog. I borrowed it from my local library and devoured it in about 2 hours. Neil Gaiman, who I've since come to appreciate in the form of his adult novel American Gods, writes a strange little tale of the headstrong and clever Coraline and her adventures "through the looking glass." This book is genuinely creepy and all that business about the imposter parents having buttons for eyes and wanting to sew buttons on Coraline's eyes with a sharp needle and some thread not only makes my eyes water, but is creeping me out even as I type this.
Coraline is a quick read wonderfully rich and textured fairy tale with a dark underbelly. *insert shudder here* I'm looking forward to the movie, but be sure to read the book before you see the movie...especially if you have small children!
"Cora"...the Explorer
Rating:
The intrepid CORAline Jones discovers adventure far over and above what she bargained for, but manages to save herself and five other souls from "The Devastation", when she discovers an other-ly, and ultimately terrifying, version of her world behind a bricked-up doorway in the new flat she and her family have moved into.
It's a cold English summer, a few weeks before the start of a new school year, when Coraline's work-at-home mom and dad buy a flat that is part of a larger house. There is much for Coraline, a bright and inquisitive child, to explore in the world around her new home. She gets to know her eccentric neighbors--two retired and aging actresses and their Scotty dogs in one flat, and a "crazy old man" in another flat. She explores the overgrown "garden" (yard, to us US residents)--checking out the old tennis courts, the meadows, the abandoned well, animals, and so on.
All goes well for a couple of weeks, until the day when it starts to rain. It rains like it really means it--turning everything into muddy soup. Coraline, bored and restless, explores the flat, which is itself unremarkable, with one notable exception. There is a locked door in the drawing room (with the uncomfortable furniture) that leads to nowhere. When her mom unlocks and opens it, Coraline sees only a brick wall, presumably separating their flat from the adjacent, empty flat. That night, she begins to hear funny noises and have weird dreams.
One day when her mother is out buying food, Coraline decides to unlock the mysterious door in the off-limits drawing room, this time finding, not a wall, but a dark hallway leading to what appears to be the same apartment in which her family lives. Sort off. There is even an "other mother" and an "other dad", who are like her own in some ways, except for a few small details, like having big, black buttons for eyes. Her other mother is happy that Coraline has finally joined them, and she intends to get the girl to live with them.
Well, that's when things really start to get interesting, but I'll leave that up to you to read for yourself. Neil Gaiman creates a warped and fantastical world for the brave and resourceful Coraline to come to grips with. The evil other-mother is behind this creative and terrifying other world. New and creepy surprises at every turn. Will she make it? Will she be able to get her real parents back? Will you be able to read it without being afraid?
I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Coraline" and finding out how everything worked out. She is a sympathetic protagonist and the reader is really drawn inti her world. I recommend this book to all readers. And I can't wait to see the movie--it will make a GREAT, suspense-filled movie.
(BTW, I read my first Neil Gaiman book this past week. I am now on my fourth one. All different and all fun to read.)
"The message is this. Don't go through the door"
Rating:
Nobody can drench a book in creepy, dank atmosphere like Neil Gaiman -- and it doesn't matter if it's a kid's book.
And "Coraline" -- now being released as a movie -- is no exception to Gaiman's track record. It's a haunting little dark fairy tale full of decayed apartments, dancing rats and eerie soulless doppelgangers, as well as a gutsy heroine who finds herself in this ominous "other" world.
Newly moved into an aged apartment, Coraline (not "Caroline" is bored. Her parents are too busy to do anything with her, and her neighbors are either insane or boring.
It's the sort of relentlessly dull world that any little girl would want to escape from -- until Coraline does. She encounters a formerly bricked-up door that leads into an apartment in another world, which looks eerily like her own. In fact, it's so similar that she has a taloned, button-eyed "other mother" and matching "other father," as well as a chorus of singing, dancing rats and magical toys.
At first Coraline is fascinated by the other world, especially since her other parents are very attentive. Then she finds her real parents sealed inside a mirror. With the help of a sarcastic cat, Coraline ventures back into the other world. But with her parents and a trio of dead children held hostage, Coraline's only hope is to gamble with her own freedom -- and she'll be trapped forever if she fails.
Without Neil Gaiman's touch, "Coraline" would just be another story about a kid who learns to appreciate her parents. But he infuses this story with a dark fairy-tale vibe -- decayed apartments, dead children in a mirror, beetles, disembodied hands, monsters that cling to the wall with souls in their grip, and rats that sing about how "we were here before you rose, we will be here when you fall."
That dark, cobwebby atmosphere clings to the increasingly nightmarish plot, as Coraline navigates a world where the other mother has every advantage. And Gaiman's wordcraft is exquisitely horrible -- the other mother's hands are compared to spiders, her hair to undersea tentacles. And the fate of the other father is a magnificently ghastly thing.
He even infuses poetry into the horror ("A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten"), and a fair amount of macabre humour ("I swear it on my own mother's grave." "Does she have a grave?" "Oh yes. I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back").
Coraline herself is a wonderful little heroine -- strong, sensible, self-sufficient but still fairly freaked out about what is happening around her. The sarcastic cat is a wonderful counterpoint. And the other mother is the stuff of nightmares -- she's utterly inhuman and merciless -- who "wants something to love. Something that isn't her. She might want something to eat as well."
Neil Gaiman creates eerie, slightly warped worlds like nobody else, and he does an exquisitely horrible job in "Coraline." Just never go through the door.
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