Journal Entry 1 by cats-eye from Bishop Auckland, County Durham United Kingdom on Monday, May 01, 2006

One of my all-time favourite books :)

Book Description (from Amazon.co.uk):

In Coraline’s family’s new flat there are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close. The fourteenth is locked and on the other side is a brick wall, until one day when Coraline unlocks the door and finds a passage to another flat in another house exactly like her own.

Only it’s different.

At first, things seem fantastic in the new flat. The food is better. The toy box is full of exciting toys, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer and little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there’s another mother and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their daughter. They want to change her and never let her go.

Coraline discovers there are other children trapped there already and she is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits if she is to save the lost children, her real parents and herself.

In this alternately whimsical, creepy, charming and dreamlike story, written in simple but elegant prose, Neil Gaiman has created a modern fairytale that is at times funny, at times frightening and at times beautifully surreal