Coraline (Neil Gaiman)

Creepy! I started reading this to find out if i want to read it with my daughter. Right now i'm not sure. The story is great, but the thing about the souls in captivity will be a little hard to explain.

It seems i've been reading Neil Gaiman stuff for ever, in a random way. back in Brazil i read the Sandman and Black Orchid "graphic novels" (expensive comic books for adults). In the USA, I read "Don't Panic" (The Official Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy Companion). I read Good Omens. And more recently, i read The Graveyard Book. But i hadn't read Coraline before.

It's a story about courage to face our worst fears, but also about embracing the world we live in, with all its imperfections. Of grace found in unexpected places and help received from inadequate persons.

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Quotes:

And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.


Nobody sensible believes in ghosts anyway -- that's because they're all such liars.


Mirrors are never to be trusted.


Coraline sighed. "You really don't understand, do you?" She said "I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything,. What then?"


She thought she could hear sweet music on the night air: the kind of music that can only be played on the tiniest silver trombones and trumpets and bassoons, on piccolos and tubas so delicate and small that their keys could only be pressed by the tiny pink fingers of white mice.


It was a story, I learned when people started to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It's the strangest book I've written, it took the longest time to write, and it's the book I'm proudest of.