Review: Coraline

When 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.

One miserably wet summer, Coraline Jones moves into a flat in an old house, with her parents who are too busy with work to pay much attention to her. She discovers a mysterious locked door in the drawing room of the flat; when she gets her mother to open the door, it swings open to reveal nothing but a brick wall. But one day, when bored and left alone in the flat by her mother, Coraline tries the door again, it opens to reveal a corridor leading to a flat quite like her own, but not quite. She ventures further into the flat, where she comes across her mother cooking in the kitchen, except her skin is paper white, she is taller and thinner, her fingers too long and her fingernails curved, sharp and dark red. The woman turns round; her eyes are big black buttons. She is the other mother and she is cooking food that smells awfully tasty. 

"I didn't know I had another mother," said Coraline cautiously. "Of course you do. Everyone does." Said the other mother, her black button eyes gleaming.

Coraline soon discovers that her father and her other neighbours in this strange world also have buttons for eyes, oh and the cat that hangs round the building can now talk.

“What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?'
'Cats don't have names,' it said.
'No?' said Coraline.
'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.” 

Coraline decides that this other world is rather more interesting than her own, but when told that she could stay, as long as she exchanged her own eyes for buttons, she decides that she could never do that and returns back home through the tunnel. However when she gets home she discovers that her real parents have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Coraline soon realises that she will have to go back through the tunnel to rescue them.

Back in the other mother’s world, the other mother soon learns that Coraline is not prepared to love her and she is thrown into the hallway mirror, where she meets three ghost children, who are also held captive. One tells Coraline, as she falls asleep, to look through the stone given to her earlier by Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two of Coraline’s neighbours. The next day Coraline uses the stone in a game of challenge with the other mother; everyone will be released if Coraline can find their lost souls. Coraline finds the souls but she still has to find her parents and persuade the other mother to reopen the door to the tunnel between the two houses. Now Coraline really closed to save her parents and the three ghost.

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The book actually quite interesting, but I didn't really enjoyed it. It's only 163 pages. So nothing much more adventurous. But it's nice book and I prefer the movie.

3 out of 5 stars