[.ca] Coraline (ISBN 0066237440)

From Amazon.com:
Coraline lives with her preoccupied parents in part of a huge old house--a house so huge that other people live in it, too... round, old former actresses Miss Spink and Miss Forcible and their aging Highland terriers ("We trod the boards, luvvy") and the mustachioed old man under the roof ("'The reason you cannot see the mouse circus,' said the man upstairs, 'is that the mice are not yet ready and rehearsed.'") Coraline contents herself for weeks with exploring the vast garden and grounds. But with a little rain she becomes bored--so bored that she begins to count everything blue (153), the windows (21), and the doors (14). And it is the 14th door that--sometimes blocked with a wall of bricks--opens up for Coraline into an entirely alternate universe. Now, if you're thinking fondly of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, you're on the wrong track. Neil Gaiman's Coraline is far darker, far stranger, playing on our deepest fears. And, like Roald Dahl's work, it is delicious. What's on the other side of the door? A distorted-mirror world, containing presumably everything Coraline has ever dreamed of... people who pronounce her name correctly (not "Caroline"), delicious meals (not like her father's overblown "recipes"), an unusually pink and green bedroom (not like her dull one), and plenty of horrible (very un-boring) marvels, like a man made out of live rats. The creepiest part, however, is her mirrored parents, her "other mother" and her "other father"--people who look just like her own parents, but with big, shiny, black button eyes, paper-white skin... and a keen desire to keep her on their side of the door. To make creepy creepier, Coraline has been illustrated masterfully in scritchy, terrifying ink drawings by British mixed-media artist and Sandman cover illustrator Dave McKean. This delightful, funny, haunting, scary as heck, fairy-tale novel is about as fine as they come. Highly recommended. (Ages 11 and older) --Karin Snelson

Chronique amazon.fr:
Coraline vient de déménager et découvre son environnement, une étrange maison qu'elle et ses parents partagent avec des voisins peu communs : deux anciennes actrices et un vieux toqué éleveur de souris savantes. "Je suis une exploratrice !", clame Coraline. Gare pourtant : derrière la porte condamnée, un monde magique et effrayant l'attend. Attention, grand frisson. En lisant ce livre, on a l'impression de regarder un film d'horreur d'autant plus horrible que sa bande-son serait une petite chanson enfantine répétitive et lancinante. Cette petite merveille renoue magistralement avec la pure tradition du conte de fées, merveilleux et terrifiant, mêlant avec raffinement naïveté et cruauté. On a peur, comme Coraline : pas vraiment, parce qu'on n'est pas dans le réel. Et, en même temps, on en est tellement près qu'on a peur quand même... Mais on y prend un énorme plaisir. L'écriture de Neil Gaiman est magnifique, simple et subtile, alliant une narration qui semble couler de source, un sens du détail et un art de l'image délectables. C'est assez complexe pour être irracontable, assez limpide pour être lu dès 9 ans... et relu à l'infini avec la même fascination. Un pur chef-d'oeuvre dans la tradition de Lewis Carrol. La nouvelle Alice s'appelle Coraline. À partir de 10 ans. --Pascale Wester

There's magic behind those walls and inside of this book:
Coraline Jones is a little girl (precise age unknown) who has recently moved into a big old house with her parents. It is the summer break from school and Coraline is bored. To pass the time she likes to explore the big house and its surroundings. One afternoon, she finds a door that leads into a black corridor. This black corridor in turn leads into a house that is practically a mirror image of her own, with the same rooms and the same inhabitants, including her parents. But within these there are fundamental changes; the rooms contain weird variations of her toys, the house and the yard are filled with talking animals and her parents are very different here too. They look like her parents but certainly don't act like her parents. Soon, Coraline and her real parents are trapped into this mirror version of their house and it is up to her to get them out safely... This is a challenging book to categorize. It is actually marketed as a book for children and adults 8 years and up. The writing is indeed geared towards a younger age bracket, the prose simplistic, the sentences short-clipped. Not only is the novel only 160 pages long, but it's large print as well. I personally breezed through this book in less than 2 hours. However, one has to wonder whether this book might be a little too dark for young kids to enjoy. Gaiman raises some deep chills here and goes for the grotesque on occasion with several scenes involving insects. Usually I find the term "Dark Fantasy" to be a cop-out used by authors who would rather not be referred to as horror writers so as not to be pigeonholed into a genre that has its ups and downs (Dean Koontz anyone?) but with Gaiman the term actually seems to fit like a glove. There's something very magical about his writing that makes us feel a part of the world he is crafting despite the fantastical premise. I loved how Gaiman used the short length of his story to his advantage. The story wastes little time getting started as Coraline actually stumbles upon the magical door at around page#25. Lots of things happen in the novel especially once the "challenge" is set forth between Coraline and her other evil mother, the pace picks up and the pages become filled with action and adventure. And the ending feels appropriate and satisfying too. The only thing I wish would have been included is some explanation, no matter how small, of how this alternate dimension came to be. But then again part of the appeal of Gaiman's work has always been about the mystique and unexplained weirdness of his tales. "Coraline" is a treasure of a story, wrapped in a small package that won't require more than two hours of a reader's time and yet will leave a lasting impression.

Open the Door, and Enter the World of a Child's Worst Nightmare:
Young Coraline Jones and her loving yet very preoccupied parents move into an enormous, ancient household. But they do not all of the house; instead, they only own one floor, the middle flat. On the bottom flat leave the two retired old actress ladies who also read tea leaves for fortune-telling, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible. On the top flat, with the attic, lives the resident whom Coraline refers to as "the crazy old man upstairs," who often tells Coraline that he runs an immensely talented circus made entirely of mice. Coraline loves to explore, and throughout the gardens and courtyards outside, there is much to explore. But one day, when it is pouring rain outside, Coraline asks her mother what she should do. Coraline's mother tells her to ask her father---so Coraline does. Coraline's father tells her that she should count everything blue, all the doors, and all the windows in the house. Later, after Coraline's counting is complete, she realizes there are fourteen doors, yet only thirteen seem to open. Coraline's mother uses the key to open the fourteenth door to show her that it only opens to a solid brick wall. Or so it seems... In the middle of the night, Coraline awakens to an eerie sqeaking and then a scraping scuttle sound. She follows the scuttle to the fourteenth door, which now newly opens to a long, dark hallway. Coraline walks through the hallway and discovers that this door opens to a whole new world. In this world, Coraline has an other mother and an other father, who both have big black, shiny buttons for eyes, and also who do not mispronounce Coraline's name as "Caroline." The other world is a complete mirror image of the real flat at home, yet hideously distorted. Coraline's other mother wants her to stay with her and the other father in this other world, but when Coraline leaves, she discovers, horrified, that her real mother and father have been kidnapped by the other mother, in an attempt to get Coraline back to her. Now, the only way left for Coraline to gain back her real parents is to challenge the other mother to a treasure hunt, and with the help of self-centered talking black cat, Coraline must fight for her very life in the other mother's deadly game. This novel surprised me. I was never suspecting that a slim novel like this could be such a page-turner, or that it could be so suspenseful, horrifying, eye-widening, and entertaining all at the same time. I would hardly consider this a children's novel, especially because many of the horrific monsters, as well as the bitter cruelty of the other mother and the distorted world she has created, could scare small children. Still, this is an excellent novel that could scare even the bravest of adults, and I am highly anticipating the film adaptation of this novel. Highly recommended!

brief fairy tale - not much more:
There really should be a law about over-enthusiastic "reviews" on the covers of books. On the cover of Coraline, the New York Times is quoted as writing "one of the most frightening books ever written!" On the inside, a who's who of young adult writers gush over how inventive and scary this book is. I'm really sorry - but the hype here is a bit much for 162 triple-spaced pages of decent but not spectacular young adult writing. Coraline has one adventure, nothing about the adventure is any more inventive, or scary, than the stuff that Pullman, Nix, Stroud and the other heavy hitters in this field do, and then it is over. Where the NY Times gets off calling this one of the scariest books ever written is beyond me.

Not so much scarey as really really ugly:
I give this book 2 stars for the writing talent the author has shown in the past and continues to display in this book. He obviously has a 5-star talent. But this book is not so much scarey as truly creepy -- and not in a nice way. This book is just ugly. And the pictures were even uglier. Think of the emotional reaction to something really sad and sick -- like maybe chronic skin infection exhudate, and that is my reaction to this story. E-e-e-w-h! If that is what you like, then the rating should be 5-star. But if you want a nice day with nice images in your brain, then avoid this book.

Coraline:
"Coraline" is a creepy little book. I read in one sitting, which attests to its shortness. Being an "adult" I still found it spine tingling, especially the black and white drawings that enhance the story. There is a graphic novel of this story coming out later this year and I will definitely check it out. Kids from ages 8 to teen will love this book and its dark characters and its terrifying creepiness.