CORALINE by NEIL GAIMAN

thebbg
Feb 3, 2015
Branje traja 2 min

Summary: Coraline’s family moves to a house in the country side. The house is old and mysterious. There are hidden passageways in it and one day Coraline finds one that was filled with bricks just a few seconds ago! She goes through it and finds herself in a strange world with her other parents. Everybody in this world has buttons instead of eyes and is different (and more interesting) from the people in her reality. She goes out of this world quite soon and her real parents disappear. She waits for a couple of days and realises that the Other Mother must have kidnapped them. She enters the other world again to rescue them and when she won’t obey her other mother she throws her into a tiny room behind a mirror. In this room she meets some friendly ghosts that tell her to run away as fast as possible while she is still alive. But Coraline doesn’t want to leave her parents behind so she makes a deal with the creepy other mother. She (Coraline) has to find her parents and the souls of the ghosts in the room and she can escape. She begins the quest and each time she finds another soul the Other world gets more demolished and ruined as her other mother gets angrier and angrier. In the end Coraline tricks her and escapes with the help of a talking cat.

Characters:

Coraline: she loves adventures and she’s always exploring. She is also very brave. People keep mispronouncing her name as ‘Caroline’ and she doesn’t like that.

Coraline’s parents: they’re both very busy and ordinary. The just don’t have the time for her.

The Other mother: she’s very tall with long fingernails. She eats cockroaches. She’s very scary and obsessed with Coraline. She can create a world with her mind.

The dead kids: Three kids, a boy and two girls from the past. They (supposedly) all entered the other world and the Other Mother killed them. One of the girls has butterfly-like wings but we don’t find out why.

Opinion: I like this book but it freaks me out every time I read it. It’s very freaky and strange but the story itself is very good. The people in the Other World have buttons instead of eyes and they turn out to be the Other Mother’s creation. In fact, she made the whole world up to get to Coraline. So pretty much everything in this story is scary. The story has been adapted into a musical, a stop motion film, a graphic novel and a video game. A whole lot of another ways to get scared.